


How I Saved Weisshaupt and Also the World

by velocitross



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Grey Wardens, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition, Weisshaupt Fortress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 06:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 54,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4424921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velocitross/pseuds/velocitross
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On his way back to Kirkwall with Adaar and Cole, Varric gets tangled up in another of Hawke's insane schemes to save the world. This time, though, he's going to be doing a lot more than just cleaning up after her, as he uncovers the secrets of an ancient Grey Warden cult that lives in the Fade and drives its followers insane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How I Saved Weisshaupt and Also the World

I call this one _How I Saved Weisshaupt and Also the World_. Working title _I Have Got to Find some Less Complicated Friends_. Working working title _If I Focus on Adaar’s Emotional Problems, I Will Have Less Time to Think About Mine_. It’s going to be a real thriller, I can tell.  
Adaar had been silent thus far, but my luck ran out eventually, and the Qunari started to talk after we’d disembarked and were headed up the Wounded Coast. Reticent the entire damned trip from Orlais to the coast, the entire time on the ship, and he opened his mouth right then.  
“I miss him,” he said, growling from right behind me.  
“Yeah, Puppy, I know,” I said, surreptitiously scanning the landscape. I knew Anders had to be out here somewhere, maybe still hiding with Fenris. Adaar and I had traveled from Skyhold with the express intent to help repair Kirkwall. It’d been a rough few years for my home in the Marches—now that the immediate threat of ‘ancient Darkspawn trying to become a god and destroy everything’ had been vanquished, I figured I’d finally have some time to devote to the reconstruction efforts.  
It hurt me to not immediately go charging off after Hawke. We hadn’t heard from her at Skyhold since she’d headed off for Weisshaupt, and I tried to convince myself that she’d just busied herself with travel.  
“But that’s why you’re here, right? A little distraction will tear Dorian straight from your mind,” I said. To myself: “Plus, you’re really, really big. I can use really big right now.”  
I was lying, naturally. If Anders were flighty around Qunari, he’d never have helped us fell the Arishok. Blood streaked down his face. Fire at his fingertips. I hated him. I apologized to Bianca and used her to part the vegetation choking the path, wrapping my right hand around a cluster of scarlet thorns in the process.  
“Shit.” I shook my hand, pulled my glove off, swore again. Adaar, apparently distracted by his enormous sorrow, plowed into me. Falling to one knee on the path, I caught myself with my wounded palm flat on the path, and again demonstrated my vast vocabulary of expletives.  
Adaar snarled and I froze. Have you ever heard a Qunari snarl? Not that scoffing, patronizing sort of snarl they do in conversation when you’ve said something that doesn’t hold up to their intellectual standards. That deep, feral snarl that ripples from that pit of rage every Qunari holds within them. It said—‘hey, handsome dwarf traveling companion, I know you are legendary among all the races of Thedas, but you are about to get your legendary arse beaten by something just out of eyesight.’ I mean, maybe he just saw a spider on a bough, but you hear a Qunari snarl and your mind doesn’t remain in the world of logic and optimism.  
I looked up and saw what he meant. I tried to smile but could only grimace—too much pain and too much him. I’d never mistake Anders. He stood a few feet down the path from us with a hood thrown over his head, and even with his eyes shadowed I could tell he was watching. He lifted a hand and my first instinct was to raise Bianca and fill the bastard full of bolts. But he just pulled the hood back, and then he was grinning that sort of absent, melancholy smile he always had. I guess that’s why Hawke liked him—she’d gone to Kirkwall and the world had broken her. Like was drawn to like, and the world had broken nobody so well as it’d broken Anders.  
“Varric Tethras, I—” His voice was hoarse, as though he’d grown unaccustomed to using it. “Hawke said you’d likely be along.”  
“Blondie,” I said, still trying to make my grimace into a smile.  
“You’re the one who started the mage rebellion?” Adaar growled from behind me. I’d regaled him with the story on the ship, and sort of regretted it now.  
Anders’ smile faded. Just a little at first, then completely gone. He looked dangerous without it, disheveled, lines beneath his eyes. I wondered if he ever slept, or if he and Fenris sat in opposite corners of their cave and glowered at each other all night. Must be hard to know you’re a fugitive—that even after years have passed, if you’re caught, you’re dead.  
Hell, I lived that. I lived it right up until I conceded to Cassandra and she didn’t run me through.  
“It’s been a while since I heard that,” Anders said, looking at Adaar. The Qunari dragged his boots across the loose shale and snarled again. Qunari bind their mages—sew their mouths shut, set great collars and chains around their necks. I would have thought Adaar’s reaction originated from culture shock, but he’d been bedding a Tevinter mage for months. That’s like the most saare of all saarebas. I guess Anders wasn’t his type.  
“Please don’t mind my giant friend,” I said, standing all the way up. Trying to look conciliating. I don’t think Anders would be stupid enough to start something, but—I don’t have the loftiest opinion of the guy, either. I mean, I’m basically the sort of dwarf to overlook personality flaws, but blatant terrorism is a lot to forgive. I turned halfway to meet Adaar’s eyes, which was as easy as making eye contact with a guilty cur. Or, in this case, a giant horned beast of preponderate strength who really, really wants to pulverize the man on the other side of you.  
“Inquisitor Adaar,” I said, holding up my bloody hand and waving until he turned his bloodshot eyes toward me. “Meet Anders. He’s an—“ Maker, I could practically feel the asshole’s critical eyes boring into my back. Waiting to hear how I described him. “—associate.”  
“Inquisitor?” Anders crossed his arms, staff resting easily in the crook of his elbow. “I’ve heard of you. The great ox-man sweeping evil from the face of Orlais.”  
I went ahead and took a step backward at that point, putting myself on the edge of the path and giving them a clear path to each other. That way I could keep an eye on both and also easily evade danger if they came to blows. I tend to err on the side of practical. As far as I knew him, Adaar was pleasant and reasonable, but he’d clearly picked up on my misgivings toward Anders.  
“Yes,” Adaar said, lifting his hand from the hilt of his sword. It dropped back into its sheath with a grating clatter. “Did you see much trouble, here?”  
Anders’ posture didn’t relax, but some of the tension around his mouth vanished.  
“Some,” he said. “Mostly the trouble that comes from protecting people from demons without revealing who I am.” But the tension returned to his face, and I knew the untold story—that he battled demons during the day and during the night, when the weakened Fade unleashed horrors into his dreams.  
Adaar smiled his ludicrous lopsided smile. “I didn’t have that problem.”  
“Yes, I suppose having every peasant and king across Thedas know your face would be—beneficial. For your line of work, at least.”  
“So now we’re all friends,” I said, glancing from massive Qunari to jaded mage. “Why don’t we complete the ritual hugging and getting sloppily drunk together later, and talk about real things now.”  
Anders leveled me with his impassive, tired stare. I met his eyes, jutting my chin up subconsciously.  
“Hawke came through here?” I asked without it really being a question.  
“Yes,” Anders said. His voice faltered just a little and I narrowed my eyes at him, trying to bore into him and telepathically ask the question I really wanted.  
(“Did you sleep with her, you miserable scrap of humanity? Or did you exercise your basic rational decision making skills and decide to free her?”  
“Of course I slept with her, because I am a god amongst selfish pissants, and I can never let her go, no matter how her happiness depends on it.”  
“Have I mentioned that I hate you?”)  
I tried to reason with myself. Hawke was a big girl. All grown up. If she’d swept through and slept with Anders, that was—her—decision. It hurt to think the words. Her decision. Nobody made Hawke do anything she didn’t want to. But, demurred a tiny voice at the back of my head, if anyone could, it would be Anders.  
“Where’s Fenris?” I asked next. Maybe I could guilt him into a confession.  
“Kirkwall.”  
I looked at him blankly. Couldn’t fathom why the elf would’ve gone back into the city.  
“Come with me,” Anders said, stepping backward and glancing around, anxiety touching his aspect. “We’re too exposed out here. I’ll explain.”  


***  


I’ve learned over the years that nothing good ever arrives in an unanticipated letter. As a younger, naïve dwarf, I always opened letters with the utmost zeal—I don’t know if that’s just a dwarf thing, to relish outside communication. I imagine it would be, living beneath the stone, but I’ve just got no experience with subterranean habitation. Anyway, letters. The first time I learned that I hated letters was when Bianca—the real Bianca, not my crossbow—wrote me to cordially invite me to her wedding.  
To. Her. Wedding. Unbelievable. I recall trying to be shocked, trying to be appalled. How could she do this. We had—promises. Plans. But one thing Bianca had always been skilled at was breaking promises. To her family, to her duty, to—me. It was bound to happen. Once I had finished trying to be surprised, I tried to be sad. It worked about just as well.  
We stood in a cave that managed to be simultaneously humid and blisteringly hot. It was straight down a precipitous hill, opened directly onto a sheer drop into the ocean, and could only be accessed via a heart-stopping drop from overhead. Perfect hiding place for those who wished above all to remain hidden. In one corner: two staves, ancient tome, collection of bones. A glitter of silver. In the other corner: human skull, length of red cloth, an enormous two-handed sword. I guess my theory of Fenris and Anders sitting in opposing corners and glaring at each other the entire night through wasn’t entirely far-fetched.  
I pushed past Anders and walked to his corner, swept up the scrap of silver and moved it into the palm of my gloved hand.  
“An amulet of the Tevinter chantry,” Anders said, his voice quiet. He moved toward me and pulled the amulet from my hand, held it to the pale sunlight so that it glittered. “Hawke gave it to me. Before the Qunari.”  
I grunted. He didn’t need to elaborate. Then I saw it—tucked into the inside cover of the book. A scrap of folded paper with –ric written on it. Or—Varric. I flipped open the book and pulled the paper out, trying to ignore the flush of agitated whispers I smoked out when I disturbed the tome.  
“So, Blondie,” I said, gesticulating at him with the paper. “You were gonna tell me about this, right?”  
“Of course,” he said. He looked offended, brows furrowed over his brown eyes. He scratched at his unkempt blonde hair, his glance toward Adaar becoming distinctly nervous. Boy, I didn’t like this. The letter had been folded and refolded, read and reread, and I struggled with my habitual instinct to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Hawke had described me as willing to lend five sovereigns to a nug, as long as he looked trustworthy. I’d laughed at her and told her she was delusional, but only because I’d lend five sovereigns to the shadiest nug alive after I _convinced_ myself he looked trustworthy.  
I leveled him with an unamused stare before unfolding the letter again, smoothing it flat, trying not to dwell on Hawke’s handwriting. I mean, the girl never was precise about anything—not about writing, not about ensuring her wild sword-strikes didn’t lop off the heads of any trusty dwarf compatriots.  
“What does it say?” Adaar said, and Anders jumped. The Qunari, crouched and disgruntled, huddled further into the cave, red-rimmed golden eyes peering at me.  
“Nothing important,” I said. True enough. I wasn’t ordinarily one to keep secrets, but the letter really wasn’t that important—just a general assurance that she’d arrived in Kirkwall (with a sidebar chiding me not to jump to conclusions about her and Anders) and a few sparse sentences at the bottom about heading into the city tomorrow. _It will scarcely be the same without you_ , she’d written. _After I see Aveline I suspect she will chase me from the city, at which point I shall head to Weisshaupt as planned. Please respond. If you know where I’ve gone and where I’m going, maybe—maybe I shall see you again. P.S., Hawke, you buffoon, remember your goddamn coin to buy new gauntlets. REMEMBER._  
“I’m sorry you missed her,” Anders said. He looked pale, as though he dearly wished to be rid of the cave.  
“What’s your game, Blondie?” I refolded the letter, pushed it deliberately into the pocket of my coat. Lifting my eyes, I met Anders’, the gambit up. I’d never trusted him—warned Hawke up and down and sideways about him—only ever allowed him to leave Kirkwall intact because Hawke wanted it.  
The mage met my eyes steadily. Even defiantly.  
“No game, Varric.”  
“I can’t even count the ways I don’t believe you.”  
Beside Anders, Adaar crouched a little, his expression concerned but his posture prepared. I’d never known a more cultured Qunari. Dorian had done a great deal in improving his manners. I knew if I snapped my fingers, Adaar would throw Anders up against the wall without hesitation. If I’d been a lesser dwarf, I would’ve exercised this power simply for the rush.  
“Why would Hawke leave Fenris here?” I closed my wounded hand into a fist and regretted it immediately.  
“She doesn’t love him.” A true darkness passed across Anders’ features. “She came back for me, she—she came back in the middle of the night, said she’d left him asleep in a room over the Hanged Man, I—I wept, when I held her, I—“  
Shit, I couldn’t help it. I took the low road. I snapped my fingers.  
Adaar grunted, placed a palm flat against Anders’ chest, and hurled the mage into a wall. Anders didn’t seem to notice at first, then blinked and shouted and shoved his weight against the Qunari’s restraining hand. To no avail. I watched the blue light come into his eyes and took a step back, scattering bones beneath my boots.  
“Stop!” Anders shouted, the supernal blue light blinking out. He thrashed hard then went limp, panting hard. “Stop. I will hurt you. I don’t want to.”  
Adaar looked toward me and I realized in that moment that the broad-chested, armor-clad, sword-and-shield-bearing Qunari would act according to my impulse. It felt strange. Hell, I’d tramped around Orlais alternately freezing and burning my ass off according to his whim only months before. I sighed. Something I didn’t like at all was happening here, but I wasn’t going to reveal what by having Adaar slowly squeeze the life out of Anders. That would be option C, and I had yet to really exhaust option A, which was ‘just ask.’  
“Adaar,” I said. Adaar nodded and stepped backward, bracing his thick forearm against Anders’ chest for a moment longer before relinquishing his hold. Anders dropped to the ground and darted a furious glance from the Qunari to me and back, then identified the true instigator and focused the entirety of his fury on me.  
That made me mad. What the hell right did he have to be angry with me? I took a quick step forward and lifted Bianca, jabbing the blade jutting from her sights into Anders’ chest, forcing him back against the wall.  
“What the hell is going on, you miserable nug-humping bastard?”  
Anders struggled. I could see it in his eyes. It sent a trill of real fear through me—I’d seen firsthand what this mage was capable of, and the thought of him struggling against something… wasn’t comforting. I steeled myself and thrust him further against the cavern wall.  
“She wanted me to send you that letter,” he said. Licked his lips. “She wanted to wait here until you knew where she’d gone.” Something flickered behind his eyes—that supernatural crystal blue limning his pupils. That’s fine, I said to myself. Come on, Justice, let’s have it all out.  
Vengeance, I reminded myself. Justice had crashed face-first into the part of Anders that was quintessentially broken and had become something not quite so magnanimous. Well, fine. I’d have it out with Vengeance. Fighting with the spirit Justice seemed a little controversial, anyway.  
“Why didn’t you send it?” You selfish prick, I added internally.  
“I thought,” he said, breaking eye contact. “If you never responded, she wouldn’t leave.”  
I had to give him points for sheer batshit lunacy. Using me to trap Hawke in Kirkwall? Hawke is my best friend, but even I recognize that the world needs us in different places. To delay a force of nature like Hawke is to condemn someone else to a worse fate. I couldn’t agree with that.  
“And how did that work out?” I snarled, ramming him against the wall one more time before relenting. I backed off and he dusted himself off.  
“Something came up,” he said, still refusing to meet my eyes. He looked—shit. So tired. So sad. “She had to go without you.”  
“Why is Fenris still here?”  
Anders lifted his listless gaze and shrugged. Something had gone out of him. That frantic, manic energy was gone, and I hated that I couldn’t hate him. I just felt sorry for him. Poor Blondie. I knew him before, you know, before that shit with the Chantry and Meredith turning into a red lyrium statue only after she’d driven every mage in Kirkwall to blood magic. I knew him when you could still make him laugh.  
“I wish you’d just ask him,” he said. Bitterness laced through his voice. I could tell he hated even talking about the elf.  
“Alright, Blondie,” I said. I figured the guy deserved a break. Months and months of Fenris’ admittedly monotonous company interrupted only by Hawke exploding back into their midst—and then she was gone, and then here I came, giant Inquisitor in tow. I nodded to him and turned to leave, but he caught my wrist as I started to walk away.  
I turned back, more than a little alarmed. He wasn’t smiling but he didn’t look openly malicious, either.  
“Let me mend your hand, first, Varric.”  
“Right,” I said. The impulse had returned the instant he’d touched me—to level Bianca and add some puncture wounds to his present list of problems. Some of the tension faded when he touched the wound and closed his eyes, a distinctly green and beneficent aura wisping around his fingers. It’s an odd sensation, to be touched by a spirit healer—the pain doesn’t immediately vanish, and there’s no sensation of flesh knitting back together. The pain folded in upon itself and retracted into my hand, worked up my arm in what felt like chunks of bone passing through my bloodstream. And then—gone. I flexed my hand, drawing the tendons tight. Anders was good. He’d healed far worse wounds on my person—the rapscallions we fought in Kirkwall had an uncanny knack for picking out the slowest member of our team (me, every time) and sticking their swords into my anatomy. I like to think I helped him hone his craft by being such an obvious target in combat.  
I clapped my renewed hand onto his shoulder and he jumped, eyes widening, the look of something hunted.  
“Take care of yourself, Blondie.”  
“I hope to see you again, Varric,” he said.  
I didn’t look back as I left the cave, and then I was too busy with the awkward process of clambering onto Adaar’s shoulders so he could boost me out of the cave, but I’m positive Anders watched the entire time we left. And then maybe he continued to watch, his tired eyes resting on the flash of sunlight off the restless tide.  


***  


We wound our way down the coast, threading along paths barely wide enough for poor Adaar. The Inquisitor went first, shouldering thorns and clinging vines aside, holding branches aloft so I could pass without a faceful of sharp twigs. He’s really a decent sort of guy, the Inquisitor—a shame that most of Thedas still sees him as a barbarian. He’d altered plenty of opinions, but there were always holdouts. Orlesians huddled in their parlors, entrenched in their ignorance. I mean—this silver-skinned son of a bitch saved everything, literally saved the world as we know it. The least he deserves is to get embarrassingly drunk like the rest of us without everyone taking two steps away from him.  
My foot struck a rock and I tripped, barely caught my balance before taking another stultifying tumble. When I recovered and looked around (to see if any passersby had seen me trip, you know), I recognized the place immediately. It was where Cassandra had caught up with us and I’d grabbed Hawke and told her I would give myself over to the Seekers.  
“You’re crazy,” she’d said.  
“Absolutely. Keep running.”  
I’d do it again. I’d do all of it again.  
But I had to focus. This place was a popular spot for the various ruffians of the coast to engage in their chosen forms of hooliganry. Guess you could say that about all of Kirkwall, though. And then, to prove my point, a body moved up close behind me, a knife cold and present against my throat. Damn rogues insist on doing everything from behind.  
“Tell the Qunari to turn around,” a hoarse, liquor-flavored voice hissed into my ear. I couldn’t really judge—I couldn’t handle a knife inebriated as well as he had.  
“Hey, Pup,” I said. “We’ve got new friends.”  
Adaar turned, his querying look fading into something stern and menacing once he saw my predicament.  
“How much do you like your head, new friend?” he rumbled, crossing his arms across his plate armor. “It seems like you’re itching to have it off.”  
The man shifted against me, the blade of his knife pressing inward.  
“Hey, Pup,” I said, laughing a little, trying to defuse the tension. I mean, I’ve had knives to my throat before. It’s not exactly a novel scenario for someone who’s friends with half of Thedas and bitter enemies with the other half. “Maybe ease up a little, huh?”  
Certainly we’d faced scenes like this before in Orlais. Rage demon got your frantic dwarf ally backed into a corner? No problem, your mage will freeze the thing while the rogue makes a convenient escape! Red Templar commander has a sword to your warrior’s neck? No problem! Your rogue can stab him in the kidney.  
Common street thug has a knife to aforementioned dwarf ally’s neck? Huge problem when you’ve left all mages and other rogues at Skyhold. Or at least I’d intended to.  
Shhhnk. The knife fell from the highwayman’s abruptly limp hand, bounced off my leather coat, landed at my feet. His weight slumped away from me. I turned and there was Cole, standing with his wicked dagger in hand, ghost-grey eyes uncertain when they found mine.  
“I wasn’t sure if I should—“  
I cut him off, hopped awkwardly over the new corpse to lift the floppy-haired kid into a tight hug. It was a bit like hugging a cat—just kind of confused and stiff but you knew secretly he liked it. I stepped back and clapped him on the shoulder.  


***  


Cole made three of us trekking into Kirkwall. The path along the Wounded Coast had always seemed nonsensical to me—it seemed engineered to lead travelers astray. And when it wasn’t leading them in large, looping circles, it was leading them directly into clearings and culverts that begged to be used as ambush points. The kid at my back gave me a little peace of mind—he had this uncanny ability to make you forget, to vanish when you’d been looking at him a second before. You’d struggle to remember his name for a second if you hadn’t seen him in a while. I’d count the members of Adaar’s party and come up short before realizing I’d been counting right over Cole.  
At last the path tipped downward, and we descended to the shore proper, passed a handful of coin into the waiting hand of a suitably shady-looking fellow to procure passage in his skiff. I’d never really been one for boats—too much pitching and rolling and water. And salt. And wind. Isabela and I used to play this game where she’d name all the things she loved about seafaring and I’d name all the things I hated about seafaring and it always resulted in two identical lists.  
But right now, in the muggy heat of mid-afternoon, it felt preferable to walking the rest of the way up the coast to Kirkwall.  
So I clung perhaps unnecessarily to Adaar’s forearm and leapt aboard. I expected Cole to make my pathetic little dwarf-jump look heroic, but he sprung nimbly and landed on his feet on the gunwale before dropping in. And then we were off, sails filling, ship gaining way. I stared up the masts to avoid staring into the water and could’ve sworn I saw a dark shape silhouetted against a sail—probably a sailor shirking his duty. Anyway, I didn’t have much time to dwell on it, on account of being robbed. Again. Who knew a seven-foot Qunari warrior and two very sharp little rogues would be such a target?  
“I’m gonna need a couple sovereigns more,” the captain said, signaling to his crew, who quickly cut the ship’s way. At least he was subtle about it—no knife-to-the-throat shenanigans for this guy. Abruptly I developed a hunch about the shadow in the sails, and abruptly the shadow proved my genius. I flashed the captain a cheeky grin and treasured his nonplussed expression.  
The shadow became Fenris. He dropped from the masthead and landed square atop the captain, disentangled himself in a moment and leapt free to land crouched a foot or so away. He loosed his sword and swept it in a grand arc through two charging crew members, then lunged for the captain. But Adaar lunged faster (somehow) and grabbed the elf unceremoniously around the waist, wresting him off and heaving him against the side of the ship.  
Shit. If I’d seen the confusion developing there, I could’ve warned him somehow. I’d been too focused on Fenris. It was hard not to focus on him, when he fought.  
“Ashkost kata!” Fenris screamed, lurching back to his feet. But the captain had regained his footing and sent an elbow smashing into the elf’s face. I grabbed Cole by the back of his coat when he went to join the affray.  
“Don’t hold me back!” he snarled, something fierce and wild in his pale eyes. I narrowed my eyes and jabbed at him with Bianca, and immediately the rage faded from him.  
Fenris stumbled up again and when the captain went to land another blow, the elf did him one better and thrust his hand through the man’s chest.  
Through. His. Chest. Shit, it’d been a while since I’d seen that. In the time it took for him to crush the captain’s living heart, I made it to Adaar and got his attention mostly by frantically pounding on him.  
“The elf is ours!” I said, and watched the tension go from his face.  
“Shit,” he said, wheeling back to Fenris as the elf converged on him. Adaar braced himself and I only barely managed to heave myself out of the way. Fenris’ sword struck the Inquisitor’s shield with titanic force and I heard—heard—sparks sheer off the metal. And then I was scrambling back to my feet and leveling Bianca at Fenris, the blue glow beginning to light across his skin.  
“Stop!” I bellowed. I threw my aim by a foot and let fly, the bolt thunking deep into the wood behind Fenris. He didn’t even blink. He twisted his sword up and around and again it smashed into Adaar’s shield—the Qunari grunted and gave a step. I’d ducked when the blow landed but now I grimaced and threw my aim a little less, sent a bolt so close to Fenris’ back he probably felt the air displaced by its passage.  
He turned on me and the scowl dropped from his face. Well, mostly. Fenris is the sort of guy who never goes anywhere without his scowl.  
“Varric,” he said. He sounded honestly surprised so I guess he’d overlooked me.  
“Broody,” I said, finally allowing myself to breathe. “Please don’t kill my associate.”  
Fenris glanced back to Adaar, who lifted his shield again as soon as the elf’s piercing glare fell on him. Poor guy would probably be scarred for life after this.  
“He attacked me,” Fenris said, turning back to me.  
“I was confused,” Adaar said.  
“In battle, the man attacking your enemy is usually your friend,” Fenris said, leveling a ‘is this actually the company you keep now’ look at me. “This is an odd coincidence. Bastards have been robbing passengers up the coast for months. Aveline has had me trying to catch them in the act.”  
“Hello,” chirped Cole. “You are full of songs.”  
Sometimes (all the time) when Cole opens his mouth, you have to think for a second about what he means. I’ve spent a lot of time with the kid and he’s still a goddamn puzzle. Everything he says is a beautiful, mind-melting riddle.  
“You mean the lyrium?” Fenris lifted a hand in front of his face. He looked like he’d just remembered it was there. Brought back memories—Isabela and I trying drunkenly to guess how far beneath his clothing the lines of engraved lyrium went.  
“Yes, and—no,” Cole said. He stepped forward and Fenris looked down at the kid with a bewildered look shadowing his green eyes. “They took you, tainted you, touched you until every part of you hurt—like being dragged through broken glass. Nothing’s real but the songs you’re seeing, singing shards of—“ Cole stopped.  
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For what they did to you.”  
“It was a long time ago,” Fenris said. “I’ve had my revenge.”  
“Mages hurt you, and templars hurt me,” Cole said.  
“I feel this leading to a very grim life lesson,” I interjected, patting Cole on the back and stepping into their midst. “What did we learn today, kids? That there’s no good in the world and everyone will hurt you given half a scrap of a chance.”  
“Does anyone know how to sail this thing?” Adaar asked. We all looked at him. He pointed at the sails, which the crew had helpfully taken in before Fenris had rendered them permanently unhelpful.  
“I mean, I’ve watched Isabela give orders to sail a ship,” I said. Admittedly not super helpful, myself.  
Fenris rolled his eyes and went back up the mainmast as quickly as he’d come down it.  


***  


Sailing back into Kirkwall, it occurred to me that I’m unaccustomed to having people relying on me for anything besides bolts in the faces of their enemies. These memories Adaar probably has—hell, he recreated an ancient Inquisition, and led its members into battle against a darkspawn god and his lyrium dragon.  
I don’t have these memories. If I wrote a memoir, I would write it about all the memories I don’t have. It would be called How I Single-Handedly Saved Kirkwall and Also the World. I would have enough influence in this story to keep Hawke as my most venerated general, and deploy her to the furthest corners of Thedas to restore order.  
Hah. Shit. I guess even in my fake memoir, Hawke and I end up separated. I don’t know how this story is supposed to end—sort of odd when I’ve spent my life writing other people’s stories and their necessary conclusions. But I have this vision of retiring—maybe in a rural part of the Marches—and Hawke is there too and let’s face it, I probably get fat. And in this fantasy, I named my crossbow after some distant family member instead of that Bianca, and Anders is a distant memory, and…  
Well. Basically just me and Hawke drinking alone in the country.  
We stumbled off the boat and Fenris wiped a palmful of blood from his face and dashed it onto the stones paving the gallows. Sort of a grim entryway into a city, but Kirkwall was a grim place on a good day. The statues looming over the city walls made me shudder—Fenris glanced at me and we shared a Look.  
“I like them better when they’re inanimate,” I said.  
“I couldn’t agree with you more.”  
Adaar walked slowly along beside us, head tipped back, clearly awestruck. Kirkwall will have that effect on a newcomer—then they’re immersed in the true culture of the place (that is to say, a neverending cesspool of humanity) and the awe fades.  
I watched it happen with Hawke. Only her awe turned into a vibrant determination to make Kirkwall into a home she could be proud of. In return, a serial killer murdered her mother. You know.  
We passed beneath the steel portcullis and into the gallows proper. My eyes found her immediately—Meredith, now a disfigured column of red-tinged ash. People gave her a wide berth.  
“Why are you here?” Fenris and I asked simultaneously. I chuckled and spread my hands in concession. Fenris crossed his arms and turned to face me. The crowd coming in off the docks parted around us, moving toward the merchant stalls to the left or the stairs to Hightown directly ahead.  
“I came to help,” I said. “Place still looks like a team of ogres had a spirited game of tag here. In the middle of an earthquake.”  
Fenris laughed his low, dry laugh. “Or like the Qunari lit the city on fire and then a lyrium-crazed madwoman brought the hundred-foot statues to life?”  
“Yeah, I guess this reality doesn’t need much hyperbole,” I said.  
“Were you hoping to see Hawke?”  
“Didn’t expect to,” I said. Didn’t mean I hadn’t hoped to.  
“She left a number of days ago.”  
I nodded. I’d figured as much.  
“We saw Anders,” I said, staring hard at Fenris, trying to gauge his reaction. He studied me carefully for a moment before pulling a piece of parchment out of the pocket of his inexplicably tight black pants. Elves were always wearing the bare minimum to cover their bodies, and Fenris was a masterwork of tight black. Apparently the lyrium made his skin sensitive to touch, and I can’t imagine the constant touch of cloth would feel great.  
I took the paper from him and unfolded it. At that precise moment, Fenris snatched it away from me again. I stood there, hand still in the shape of ‘holding a piece of paper,’ for a long moment before I lifted an unamused stare to the elf.  
He looked nervous. “It’s—not something to read right now. We need to talk somewhere private. Hawke wanted you to know.”  
“Know what?” All this goddamn secrecy wore on me. Hard to be chipper as usual when my soulmate had gone traipsing off somewhere I suspected has ceased to be Weisshaupt, leaving behind an exceptionally twitchy mage lover and a nervous boyfriend.  
“What we found,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder and then turned, striding off toward Lowtown without checking to make sure I’d follow.  


***  


Ah, the Hanged Man. We entered and the atmosphere pulled over our heads like a smothering, rancid-smelling blanket. Typically the gathering place for the denizens of Kirkwall least likely to have bathed in recent memory, the place nonetheless felt like home. Always had. I wondered if they’d kept my suite upstairs—but watching a burly stranger descend the stairs disavowed me of that tiny hope.  
They kept the lighting in here purposefully dim, the better to conduct illicit business by. It felt like a suitably shifty location for Fenris to pull me over to a table in the corner. He sat down and I followed, taking a seat across from him. Adaar sat down beside me and Cole, who’d been flickering in and out of notice, joined Fenris on the other side of the table. The kid seemed infatuated with the elf—or maybe just with the songs his skin sang.  
“You gonna kill me or proposition me, Broody?”  
“Neither.” He smiled a little. “Maybe both.”  
He pushed the letter across the table to me, held my eyes as I unfolded it, until I glanced down to read.  
_Dear Varric,  
I wrote before that I was going to get expulsed from Kirkwall and go to Weisshaupt, but—  
shit I haven’t slept in days how am I writing  
how am I still  
anyway I decided to stay and help Aveline with the aLL HAIL RAMIROTH LORD OF THE SUN  
and stars  
blood on my hands so I’m sorry if it’s on the paper I can’t really see right now  
my brain is full of moths, shit SHIT SHIT  
Varric you have no idea they’re naming names they have no right to know they—I woke up with a letter in my hand and it said “goodbye Sunshine” and shit she’s already dead but WHAT ELSE CAN THEY DO To her  
Please let my sister rest please  
please—shit—Huna and Salome, you have to go see Aveline  
don’t tell Fenris anything  
Anders is different  
Don’t follow me. I’m leaving to find her because the second is a warden and oh god I fear—  
\--Hawke_  
I lowered the letter and Fenris’ brow furrowed. He clasped his hands and stared at me, leaning forward.  
“Andraste’s dimpled ass,” I said. Adaar gave me a rather critical look askance. “I guess I can’t come back to Kirkwall and just have an easy time lending a hand, can I.”  
All jesting aside, I could read the concern in Fenris’ face. He never looked relaxed or content, but once when he’d drunk a bottle of wine by himself, I saw him grin.  
“Fenris,” I said.  
“Yes.”  
“What the shit is this.”  
He looked down at his hands, spread them palms-down on the table. “We encountered—trouble.”  
“Clearly.” He didn’t say anything further. “Fenris,” I said.  
“Yes.”  
“Is she safe?” I leaned forward across the table and lay my hand atop his. He flinched and his green eyes were up, boring into mine. I’d forgotten the intensity of that stare—the stare of a man who’d lost everything and gained everything but stood ready at every moment to lose it again. He leaned forward too and grasped my hand tightly between his, fairly baring his teeth at me.  
“No.” Everything went out of him. He slumped backward, releasing my hand, putting his elbows on the table and cradling his forehead in his hands. “She told me nothing, Varric. Nothing. There were murders before she first arrived back—Aveline told her of them. It seemed to affect her.”  
Of course. Her mother. Of course catching wind of a new series of murders would pique her interest. Probably simultaneously caused her immeasurable pain. I ached. I wished—I wished she’d waited for me. But she’d left Skyhold in such a blazing hurry, intent on reaching Weisshaupt to warn the Wardens of Corypheus and his potential power over them. I can’t say it wasn’t a worthwhile reason to be in a hurry. But I wish she’d waited. I nodded.  
“So we began to investigate them. Simple things. It seemed routine. To have her back.” He scowled and lifted his face, looked anywhere but at me. “I think it affected her more than I realized. We discovered there were multiple people committing the murders. A… cult, of sorts. We discovered that one man led them. And then—“ His gaze fell to the letter.  
“Then Hawke decided making sense was for the weak and lazy?”  
“You wouldn’t have recognized her,” Fenris said. “She vanished for days at a time. She returned raving and scratching at her skin. I couldn’t stop her. She stopped… including me.”  
“So Hawke devised a bullheaded scheme and insisted on it, no matter what you said?” I laughed a little, but found it difficult. “That sounds just like her.”  
“She found something,” he said. “I know she did. And then she vanished.”  
Abruptly everything froze. My hands tensed on the table. My chest tightened. That sense of sickening dread and anxiety returned—like everything around me had been submersed beneath water.  
“Like Bartrand,” I said. She found something like Bartrand and now I have to go find her and bring her back.  
Fenris watched me. “Yes,” he said. “That is my concern.”  
I sighed, scrubbed at my eyes with the heel of one hand.  
“Shit went to hell faster than usual, it sounds like,” I said. “So what’s the plan?”  
Fenris tilted his head and examined me closely. Nobody said anything. I looked around at all of them and spread my hands, hoping my expression adequately demonstrated my consternation.  
“So we’re all trusting the dwarf now, huh? What a… peculiar turn of fate. Inquisitor.” I shot Adaar a piercing look, and he shrugged, smiling a little ruefully.  
“Spotlight’s yours, brother,” he said.  
I guess it seemed fitting—Hawke had always been mostly my responsibility, even in the midst of her torrid love affair(s). She was the one gallivanting around Kirkwall solving the city’s problems and I was the sidekick trotting in her midst, providing backup and tidying up the spate of little messes she left in her wake. I knew her best. I knew how to decipher the madness that had come spilling out of that letter.  
“You said you uncovered a cult?”  
“Yes,” Fenris said.  
“A cult with what end?”  
A look of intense frustration passed across his face. “Hawke told me she thought she knew, and then she vanished for four days, and when she returned she did not speak to me anymore about it.”  
“So,” I said. “Where did Hawke go, when she left?”  
Fenris wouldn’t meet my eyes, and something very cold gripped my heart.  
“I do not know,” he said. “I woke up one morning and she was gone. Apparently she told Aveline that she’d found something out and needed to stop something terrible from happening.”  
“Sounds like Hawke,” I said. I hoped she was okay but my instinct—about her, about the way this type of scenario usually went—told me she couldn’t be. I couldn’t stop thinking about her letter—why would she beg me not to follow her? Her first letter had said that maybe if I knew where she was, she’d be more likely to come back. But that had been when she’d still been planning on simply swinging by Weisshaupt to warn the Wardens. Really, though, she ought to know that imploring me not to follow guaranteed I would.  
“We know she found something out about this—cult you mentioned,” I said, folding my hands on the table.  
“It’s alive,” Cole said. We all looked at him but his focus wandered, his pale eyes following motes of dust that eddied on the shaft of light through the upper windows. “It’s—angry.”  
He blinked and looked at me. “I’m scared.”  
I shivered in spite of myself. Cole was originally a creature of the Fade, and things formerly of his ilk disturbed him. Hearing Cole admit to being afraid was like having him look dead into my eyes and tell me there was a ghost standing right behind me. Next to me, Adaar shifted, drumming his fingers on the table. I could see him itching to draw his sword—he’d always preferred an enemy he could confront directly.  
Fenris glanced around and when he looked back at me his pupils were dilated, his mouth open. He was panting. And sweating. Shit.  
“Don’t talk about it,” he said.  
“Sorry to tell you, Broody, but my other half is missing and I’m going to talk about all sorts of things until I have her back,” I said, trying and probably failing to mask the quaver in my voice. I kept seeing Bartrand again, crazed, delirious with the lyrium in his mind. Summoning horrors and raving like an absolute madman. The moments of clarity when he’d begged me to kill him, screamed at me, imprecating me for not doing it when I’d had the chance.  
What if I—shit, what if I found Hawke similarly stricken? What if she begged me to kill her?  
I clenched my hands, tendons in my neck bulging. Hawke had seen Bartrand—she’d been right there with me. She wasn’t stupid. I kept telling myself that. Hawke wasn’t stupid, she’d seen what had happened to Bartrand when he’d messed with shit he couldn’t handle. I’d find my girl and I’d stand beside her (well, slightly behind her, maybe) and we’d fight off whatever she’d found to tear her away from murders in Kirkwall. Something about this scenario left me deeply disturbed—the Hawke I knew had a tight focus. It’d annoyed the hell out of me when we’d operated together in Kirkwall. She’d accept one task and beat at it until it was gone. According to Fenris, she’d uncovered a cult responsible for murders in Kirkwall (a string of words guaranteed to warrant her utmost focus) and had then uncovered information worthy of distracting her from beating the shit out of whoever was responsible for putting another person through the pain her mother had experienced.  
The pain she’d experienced, holding her mother as she’d died. Being alone in the world without her mom. Shit. They’d found out that the cult had a single leader—that should’ve given Hawke a single target to come down upon. And instead she’d cut town? After telling Fenris that she thought she’d uncovered the cult’s design? No. No.  
I slammed my fist onto the table and everyone (let’s face it, even me) jumped about a foot. I’m not usually one for outbursts or histrionics, but it infuriated me to know Hawke wasn’t safe and I had no sodding clue how to help her. Or hell, even find her. She was acting so far outside of my parameters for her behavior, I didn’t even have a hunch. I blinked and found Fenris staring at me. He looked—different. What had Hawke’s letter said? ‘Anders is different.’ I intuited she meant more than ‘our time apart has marred our strange, torrid relationship.’  
“What do you mean, anyway, when you tell me not to talk about it?” I decided to press the issue.  
“Twisting and teething, fangs forcing through. It’s—remembering, reforming into something better and worse and—you can’t stop me, you know not the forces you meddle with.”  
Cole, arms wrapped around himself, shook inconsolably. Something dark had drawn across his guileless grey eyes. I would’ve chastised myself for bringing him along, given his—ah—susceptible nature, except it wasn’t my idea and I had no clue we’d apparently be facing down—whatever this was. Hell, my plan all along had been to buckle down and sweep up some rubble.  
“Varric,” Cole said.  
“Yeah, kid?”  
“I’m tired.”  
I exhaled slowly.  
“Come on, kid,” I said, standing up and beckoning him along with me as I walked to the bar. We’d been there longer than I thought—fear and confusion have a way of turning time into molasses. The only patrons left looked the same as I felt—all sweat and blood and torn clothing.  
The barkeep—Stanley, I think this one was called, new guy when I’d left—looked immediately over my head and took a generous step backward. Adaar stood (as was his habit) unnecessarily close behind me, demonstrating the personification of the word ‘looming.’ People in Kirkwall tended to react badly to Qunari—I mean, they did light the city on fire and sever the viscount’s head—and I didn’t have time to explain that my hulking friend was both Tal-vashoth and the famed Inquisitor. Maybe he’d earn us a fear discount. Or a knife in the back.  
“We need rooms,” I said. “Maybe for a while.”  
Stanley narrowed his eyes and I figured he’d either take our coin or start lobbing wine bottles at us.  
“One room is all I’ve got left,” he said. I knew the prick was lying, trying to get us to go elsewhere.  
Game on, Stanley. Deliberately I pulled the sovereigns from my coat pocket and let a few clink onto the counter, one by one.  
“Fine,” I said.  
He pulled my money across the counter and counted it, shooting Adaar a number of wary glances. Without a word, he pulled a key from beneath the counter and pointed to a door at the top of the stairs.  
Fenris stopped at the foot of the stairs, and I stopped to look at him.  
“I will let you rest, then,” he said. He sounded uncertain. It occurred to me that we probably could’ve stayed with him—far as I knew he still occupied Danarius’ Hightown mansion—but shacking up in Fenris’ dark, freezing, house was somehow less appealing than sharing a bed with Adaar. Besides, with the way Fenris had been acting all evening, I wasn’t sure I trusted him. An awful feeling, but one I had to pay attention to.  
“We’ll see you later,” I said, and Fenris left.  
“You’d better not snore,” I said to Adaar, turning to climb the stairs.  
“I have a question,” the Inquisitor said, pushing open the door to our room and sinking down onto the bed. I sat down next to him on a mattress that felt like it was stuffed mostly with cockroaches. “What happened here? How do you know the elf?”  
Cole, apparently uninterested in our conversation, climbed onto the bed behind us and curled into a fetal position to sleep. I didn’t know if he just liked sleep or if he actually needed it since becoming more human, but the sound of his steady breathing behind me stilled my nerves somewhat.  
“It’s a long story,” I said. “You could always just read it, if you want to make my publisher smile. Tale of the Champion.”  
“The champion is… you?”  
I lost it. I couldn’t help it. I laughed hard. “No. Hawke. Look, you should just read the book. It’s easier than explaining. And I’m not just saying that for publicity. Basically—Hawke and I met just before Kirkwall went to hell. It went to hell in a lot of various, colorful ways. A lot of people died. Fenris is Hawke’s—“ I paused. Boyfriend? Hawke’s little wolf, whom she’d stolen from Danarius and made her own? “—companion.”  
It sounded lame. Adaar lifted an eyebrow.  
“I signed up to come help rebuild a city with you, Varric,” he said, smiling a little. “I pictured myself putting walls back together. Contributing to charities.”  
“Yeah, yeah. And now we’re trying to find out where my friend went, which will foreseeably involve tense conflict with whatever this cult is.” I chuckled. “When it comes to complicating what should be a simple plot, I’m considered one of the best in the business.”  
The smile left his face. Adaar leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked closely at me.  
“Who can we trust, in this?”  
Mentally I went through the list. Anders? Hah. Fenris? Acting kind of shifty. Aveline? Aveline.  
“Trust me until I start babbling about the lord of the sun,” I said. “Otherwise, I know someone.”  
“What about Cole?”  
I opened my mouth but had nothing to say, and we both shifted to look at the sleeping young man.  
“I trust Cole to not stab me in the back,” I said. “I trust him.” I recognized the words as sentimental as I said them—I’d sort of taken the kid under my wing in our time at Skyhold. The thought of him turning on me couldn’t be considered. Not now.  
“Me too,” Adaar said. “I’m going to sleep.”  
He tipped backward and maneuvered his legs around me where I still sat on the edge of the bed. Without any trace of hesitation or awkwardness, the Inquisitor grabbed Cole around the midsection and pulled the boy against himself. Adaar curled in around Cole until I could hardly see the kid—but he didn’t even wake up, just slept on comfortably ensconced by Qunari.  
Well, whatever worked for them.  
“By the way,” Adaar muttered, his voice already thick with sleep. “I do snore.”  


***  


I’ve mentioned that unanticipated letters never bode well in my universe. You know what else never bodes well? Being awoken in the middle of the night by screaming. That probably takes first prize as ‘thing I would least want to be woken up by.’  
A million possibilities appeared in my brain the instant I awoke. Before I considered myself fully conscious, my body moved. I levered myself up from where I’d fallen asleep sitting on the floor propped against the bed, groped for Bianca in the darkness, and hit the door before I remembered how to work a doorknob. At that point I wasn’t even sure whether the scream had been real or manufactured in a dream—you don’t go through what I’ve been through and not suffer some nightmares.  
I pulled the door open and half-ran, half-fell down the stairs. Adaar, abruptly behind me, grabbed me with a forearm across my chest and heaved me back to my feet when I hit the last step and almost faceplanted. He crashed into a table in the darkness, righted himself, and smashed through the Hanged Man’s door into the deep night outside. I guess at least that told me that the screaming had been real.  
I took a moment and caught my breath. Rational thought came swimming back to me. I felt strange, each thought disjointed and disconnected from the last, and I shook my head, trying to attribute the feeling to being wrenched from sleep. I’d been dreaming of getting ready for bed in Skyhold, strangely enough. It’d been comforting.  
Cole appeared beside me, arms around himself, eyes wide and staring straight ahead.  
“I’m freezing,” he said, his voice low in the back of his throat. “It’s right outside, Varric, please don’t—please let’s not go.”  
“Cole,” I said. “We have to help. No matter how scared you are.”  
He tilted his head and his grey eyes were almost white when they swept across me. I rethought my statement from last night—the only time I’d seen a look like that had been in the eyes of the man who’d killed Hawke’s mother. And some darkspawn, the more sapient ones. Blank, hollow, not quite there. Drifting.  
“Stay in here,” I hissed at him, unsure if Cole could even still hear me. There wasn’t time to wait and I was fairly certain there was nobody left in the bar—at least not anybody likely to come out of their rooms. I put a hand on Cole’s back and led him to a chair, which he sat in compliantly enough. I nodded at him and trotted out the door, jamming a handful of bolts into Bianca.  
The night in Kirkwall is usually lit by any number of torches—more in Hightown than in Lowtown, but it’s still never completely dark. Or at least it’s usually not. Tonight I blinked into a wall of entire blackness, waved a hand in front of my face to ensure I hadn’t gone blind. Nope—the pale shape of a hand registered clearly. I groped in front of me for the looming ashen form that had to be Adaar.  
“Pup,” I hissed.  
“Varric, don’t—“ His blurred silhouette bent double. I took a step back, wondering if this were all some elaborate dream---every motion, every sound in the darkened street had taken on a minatory, nightmarish quality. Either I was dreaming or some really strange shit was going down.  
A flash lit through my mind. Not in front of my eyes, but through my thoughts, a burst of light that left a low intonation of chanting in its wake. The voices rose through my mind, rising and rising until I clapped my hands to my ears and stumbled forward, dropping Bianca and smacking into Adaar. I fell to my knees and the Inquisitor roared and charged away from me. I glimpsed three pale smudges standing at a distance. The Inquisitor exploded into their midst and shakily I knew he would need help.  
If this was what I thought it was—if those figures were distorting my thoughts, filling my mind with voices, there’s no way one Qunari could use brute force to eliminate them. But Maker, I wished he would. All I wanted were these foreign voices out of my brain. I struggled back to my feet and managed to make it back to Bianca. Hoisting her up, I took aim, couldn’t stop shaking as the chanting continued. It’d reached a volume that I knew would drive me insane if it kept up for too long, blasting away every hope of cohesive thought.  
Adaar rammed into one of the figures with his shield, sending it sprawling, before ducking his head and toppling the other with a good smack of his head. That’s the good and bad thing about Qunari—every part of them is a weapon. But the third figure stood behind him and lifted its hands and I cried out what I hoped was a fearsome battlecry as I leveled Bianca and fired without really knowing what my target was.  
It made no sound. I couldn’t see the bolt, but I saw the figure burst into a plume of smoke, and a freezing wind gusted against me and carried the smoke into the starless sky. Adaar cried out and I smothered my consternation. No way I’d fire a bolt into the affray without putting a new hole in the Inquisitor. So I improvised. After all, Bianca carried a heavy, short blade in front for a reason. I charged forward, the only sound my boots against the stone, and swung Bianca at the first pale shape I encountered.  
No contact. The shape wisped upward, wind rose, and that’s when I noticed that both shapes we’d dispatched had reformed several feet away and were running.  
“Not on my watch,” I growled and took off, leaving Adaar still tussling with the third figure. Why could he engage physically with them, but I couldn’t? And who had screamed? The two fleeing shapes hurdled a collection of broken crates littering the alleyway and I clambered over them, panting hard. No matter how fast I thought I ran, they remained just far enough ahead of me to remain unidentifiable. Finally, they ducked down an alleyway and vanished into the darkness.  
I stumbled to a halt and had to lean on the side of the alleyway to catch my breath. Shit. You’d think tramping around the various climes of Ferelden and Orlais hunting lethal factions would acclimate a guy to sudden bursts of activity. But I guess even when we were fighting, I didn’t do a lot of running around. It lent credence to my theory that once I retired with Hawke, I’d instantly gain fifty pounds. Dwarves aren’t the sort to expend energy when it’s not strictly necessary, and the moment I didn’t have anyone’s world to save, I would stop expending energy entirely.  
I thought of Hawke while I tried to convince my lungs to stop burning. In my brain the progression was clear: Hawke had come to Kirkwall to solve Aveline’s murders, but had gotten tangled up in something that went deeper. Something had made her vacate the city and leave the murders unsolved. So to find her, I had to embroil myself in the same progression, and that began with the murders. Hawke’s mind worked along some strange and complicated lines, and I hoped I could mimic her progress. Find what she’d found. And hopefully, once I did, I would also learn exactly where to find her.  
Adaar crashed through the crates behind me (I’ve never known a Qunari to be terribly fond of jumping), sword drawn, shield still over his arm. That’s when I noticed the light returning—it’d happened without me even noticing, which was odd given how much I’d noticed its absence. But now when I looked up, stars glittered between the clouds, the barest touch of pink dawn beginning to color the sky.  
“I found the screaming,” Adaar said. “I mean the screaming that wasn’t in my head.”  
“Funny,” I said. “I had chanting.” Had. Thank the Maker. I hadn’t really noticed that leaving, either. But now my mind was clear and ready to chase itself in circles over these puzzling circumstances.  
“Yeah, I had that, too.” The Inquisitor had looked better. His face was drawn and haggard, like he’d lived a week in the handful of minutes we’d been out here. He gestured for me to follow and hooked his shield onto his back before turning and leading the way back through the maze of alleyways I’d run through.  
Back in front of the Hanged Man, a smear of blood preceded the corpse. She lay sprawled as though she’d been killed while dancing, one arm outstretched, legs mid-stride. An elf. Cole stood with the door of the Hanged Man half open, his hat shadowing his eyes.  
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s find a guard before we get implicated in a murder.”  
The guardsmen arrived and a pair of them carried the corpse away while the rest roamed around searching for witnesses. I showed them the alleyway the two fleeing shapes had disappeared down, and Adaar tried again and again to explain how he’d stabbed a man whose face kept changing, before the man had turned into a swarm of moths in his hands. We got a lot of strange looks. I got the most strange looks, because Cole stood beside me clinging to my coat sleeve, invisible to the guards. Every time I tried to push him off me, or offer some reassurance, or even ask if he’d seen anything—yeah, I got a lot of strange looks.  
“I don’t even know how to write this,” a guard said, scratching at his beard and looking quizzically at Adaar. They’d all been reproachful at first around him, but as I’ve mentioned before, when he’s not fighting, Adaar isn’t the most intimidating Qunari. Now they had no problem informing him his story was implausible. “Did he strike you, at all? Do you have wounds we can document as evidence?”  
“No,” Adaar said, crossing his arms. The sun had risen an hour ago and the sun baked down relentlessly upon us, glinting off the Qunari’s armor. “Unless I’m fighting demons, I don’t really get wounds.”  
The guard eyed him. “Right,” he said. “I don’t know what the captain will want us to—“  
“She wants you to write down the man’s story,” Aveline said, moving through the crowd of guardsmen and assembled folk. She’d always carried herself proudly, but there was a new sense of authority about her that I, having known her for years, found exquisitely intimidating. Some people perverted power to their own means, became corrupt, and wielded their authority with devastating effect. Aveline remained within the boundaries of the law, was universally perceived as just and honorable, and still wielded her authority with devastating effect. She’s a better person than anyone I know. And somehow, I could sense that this would become a problem.  
The guardsman nodded and began questioning Adaar for the fifth time. Aveline watched for a moment before turning to me, already looking displeased, red eyebrows drawing down above her green eyes.  
“My job always becomes more difficult when you appear, Varric,” she said.  
“And more interesting,” I said. “Admit it, you like having me around.”  
She lifted an eyebrow and smiled. Aveline had a sort of plain but intensely endearing smile that was even rarer than Fenris’. I’d enjoyed being with the Inquisition—the lot I’d worked with in Kirkwall were universally of a dour sort, but with the Inquisition I’d have them all drunk and roaring with laughter an hour into our games of Wicked Graces. Maybe that just says something about their drinking habits.  
“Why are you here, Varric?” she asked, crossing her arms as if she needed to look more intimidating. Hell, that glare of hers could freeze beer—she probably wore armor as more of a formality than anything.  
“That answer has changed recently,” I said. “You want the old answer or the updated one?”  
“Both, preferably,” she said, eyes drifting over to where the guards continued to grill Adaar. Two others had joined in, because apparently Kirkwall’s guardsmen found writing difficult.  
“Why am I not surprised to find you here in the middle of this?” She looked back to me.  
“If it’s any consolation, this isn’t at all what I had in mind,” I said. “Plan was to help rebuild. Never expected Hawke to have been here. Now the plan is to find out where she went.”  
Aveline’s mouth twisted and I figured she knew what I was about to say.  
“I’d appreciate you help.”  
She sighed. Poor Aveline. The most righteous woman in the universe got stuck with friends like me and Hawke. Not bad people, necessarily, but people who attracted bad people. Hawke couldn’t keep away from trouble and I couldn’t keep away from Hawke.  
“You know I’m always here for you,” Aveline said, finally. “You and Hawke are a natural disaster, but—I’m here when you need me.”  
“Well, I need you now,” I said. “Whoever did this—“  
“The illusory men who killed a woman and then became incorporeal, you mean?”  
“Yeah. Them. They filled our brains with noise and messed with Cole pretty bad.”  
“Who’s Cole?” Aveline’s brow tightened.  
Cole met my eyes and then looked directly at Aveline.  
“I’m Cole,” he said.  
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, watching the confusion play across her face as she stared at where Cole wasn’t. “I need to know what you know about these murders.”  
Aveline sighed again, rubbed at the bridge of her nose.  
“I sent Hawke a letter about this and I seem to have led her astray from her original intention in the Anderfels,” she said. “And then, when she tried to help me solve my case, she went insane and ran off. I’m inclined to keep this all a secret from you.”  
“Aveline,” I said. I spread my hands. My vast reserves of charm and charisma wouldn’t work here—Aveline saw right through charm and charisma. So I drew on pity. “Aveline. This is Hawke. I feel bad for the people being killed, you know I do, but all I care about is finding Hawke.”  
She frowned. “Why do you have to learn about these murders to find Hawke?”  
“Are you kidding? She found something while she was helping you look into them. I need to find that same thing if I have any hope of finding where she could’ve gone.” I shook my head slowly. “I have no. Idea. Where she went. And I’m thinking that neither do you, and I know Fenris doesn’t.”  
Aveline stared at me for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “Alright, Varric. I’ll give you access to my information. But I have some caveats for you.” She turned away and beckoned me to follow her. “Not that you’ll listen to them. But my conscious insists I give them.”  
I followed her through the streets of Lowtown back to the Gallows and from there to Hightown, Cole wandering in my wake, Adaar still outside the Hanged Man answering the same question fifty times.  


***  


The old seat of power in Kirkwall, the Viscount’s administrative building and home to the city guard’s captain and headquarters, had suffered extremely. The staircase leading up to the building looked like a furious dragon had landed, and then maybe exploded. Huge chunks of stone were missing, scorch marks leading up to the massive double doors. If I squinted, I could see pink stains where the blood hadn’t quite come off the stone.  
Aveline led me up the stairs and there, standing at the doors, stood Fenris. He leaned against a pillar and fixed us with an impassive stare. He didn’t look as nervous as he had the night before, but I still approached with caution. Cole crept around me and reached Fenris first, and the elf’s sharp green stare reached the kid before flicking over to me.  
“Cole,” he said, and nodded toward me. “Varric.”  
Aveline looked quizzically at him. “Are you all sharing some delusion? Who is Cole?”  
“I am Cole,” Cole said, sounding a little indignant. I didn’t blame him—must be a tough break to live with a bunch of people who made you real and then return to an unfamiliar environment where some people just couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see you at all. I wondered how it worked—we’d successfully made Cole more human, after all. He said it was harder for him to just vanish from perception. I guess some people still didn’t meet whatever parameters the universe had set for noticing Cole.  
“Don’t worry about it,” I said again, patting the kid on the back and receiving a three-parts confused and one-part scathing look from Aveline.  
I could tell by the way she walked past Fenris that she trusted him about as much as I did—she might as well have pulled her sword and held the point toward his face as she edged by him. Aveline pushed the doors open with their familiar ages-tired creak, doused us all in that familiar heavy air and scent of sweat and paper and steel.  
I stood in the doorway for a moment, trying not to be too nostalgic. How many times had we burst through these doors, Hawke out of breath and usually lathered in blood, looking for Aveline or the Viscount?  
“When we came here, she stopped just where you did,” Fenris said from beside and behind me. I looked over my shoulder at him and smiled.  
“Birds of a feather, and all that,” I said.  
“The first step she took into the Gallows, she stopped and said, ‘I miss him so much I find it hard to breathe,’” he said. He looked at me keenly, studying me.  
“Well, Broody, I wish I could’ve told her right there that I miss her three times as much as that.”  
“We’ll find her,” he said. Something desperate overtook his unmoving expression. “We’ll find her,” he said again, under his breath, before moving after Aveline, who hadn’t bothered to stop and wait for us. We’d exploded into her office uninvited enough times, I guess she assumed we knew where to find her.  
The grand hall with its many staircases held fewer people than I’d ever seen in my time in Kirkwall. Just a sparse few nobles gathered there now, waiting on audiences or reveling in their wealth and time. Hell, I don’t have any idea what the wealthy in Kirkwall do to pass the time. I could be considered a member of the upper crust of society, now, but I still spent my days risking my damn hide.  
We passed from the smell of books into the smell of sweat and steel, walking past a gaggle of bored-looking guardsmen into the hallway that housed the city’s finest. Left turn, and I followed Fenris into Aveline’s office.  
The guard captain already had a vast collection of books and written notes spread across her desk, and was standing with palms flat on the wooden surface. She fixed me with a grim expression.  
“Let me tell you something, first of all,” she said. “For all I know, and all I’ve found, this cult is a new addition to Kirkwall’s usual riffraff. But they command extraordinary power. Unearthly power.”  
“So you knew that? Why treat me like I was high out of my mind when I gave you my story, then?”  
Aveline closed her eyes, pursed her lips, and looked at me again. “I don’t know why, but investigating this cult and the murders they’re committing has a tendency to make people lose their minds.”  
“Ah,” I said. “Shit.”  
“I had to close the investigation rather hastily when it started to affect the guardsmen I had assigned to it. I took it on personally. That’s when I sent Hawke that letter.”  
“What exactly did you tell her?”  
She lifted her hands, exasperated. “I needed help, Varric! I was out of options. She investigated another supernatural killer previously—“  
“Andraste’s asshole, Aveline, that killer killed her mom.”  
“I know!” She set her hands back on the desk and leaned her weight onto them. “We’d had six murders already by the time I took on the investigation myself. Six! So I requested information from Hawke. How she’d narrowed down her search, what sources in Lowtown she’d contacted.”  
“The only source we had, I put a bolt through,” I said.  
“Well, I didn’t know that,” she said. “And I didn’t know she’d drop everything and divert through Kirkwall. But she showed up on my doorstep and I wasn’t about to turn away the extra set of eyes.”  
“You said you took your men off the case, when you noticed the madness overtaking them,” Fenris said abruptly from the doorway. “Hawke stopped talking to me about her research the instant I began—losing myself.”  
Oh, good. At least he was aware of how tense and creepy he seemed. I mentally added his name to my list of ‘people not to turn my back on.’ I also added another goal to my ever-expanding list of tasks in Kirkwall: Don’t get stabbed. Especially don’t get stabbed by someone I once considered an ally.  
“And then she left,” I said. “That’s why she didn’t take you. She was worried. Really, really crazy, and worried.”  
The elf looked haggard. He didn’t say anything else.  
“By the time Hawke found whatever she found, we’d gotten far enough in our investigation to determine there is a single man controlling the actions of the cult,” Aveline said. “It was a fluke. We also discovered that the incorporeal beings you described are, in fact, simply men using magic.”  
“Tell me, oh guard captain, how did you reach that conclusion?” I asked. Fellows had seemed pretty damned incorporeal to me.  
She smiled. “We surprised one.”  
Fenris laughed. “He yelped like a frightened dog and ran two paces, tripped, and landed on his face. Picked himself up and vanished into smoke, but managed to leave his bag behind.”  
“That’s when we found this,” Aveline said, pushing a piece of tattered parchment toward me across the table.  
I scanned it—cryptic bullshit, meet here when the raven flies thrice about the sun and all that, but a single signature at the bottom and an ominous last line: for Ramiroth’s enduring glory.  
“This guy,” I said, tapping the signature. “Endreth. He’s the leader?”  
“As far as we can tell,” Aveline said.  
Cole’s hands abruptly gripped my upper arm and I’m pretty sure I simultaneously leapt into the air and shed three years of my life.  
“He’s not real,” he said. “He tries to pretend, but he knows he’s just a reflection without a reflection. He stands in the dark and stares across the sea and something calls him, something deep. He tried for so long to resist but he can’t anymore. His mind isn’t his and it frightens him, but what can he do? Endreth, I have to go, Ramiroth calls and I believe I may have found him—“  
He broke off when Aveline fairly leapt across the desk at him, drawing her sword with a shriek of steel. She was limber as ever, I noticed. Cole didn’t back away and I felt a trill of probably misplaced pride—he didn’t reach for his daggers but he didn’t give ground, just stared at her defiantly, still clinging valiantly to my arm.  
“I am Cole!” he said, a fierce anger in his voice.  
“I swear to every deity known across Thedas, Varric,” Aveline said, glancing toward me, keeping her sword on Cole. “If you don’t explain this right now, I will destroy everything within a foot radius.”  
“This is Cole,” I said. “Or ‘kid’. Answers to both.”  
“Why—“ she spluttered. “Why couldn’t I see him? A moment before, nothing, and then there he is, talking.”  
“Honest answer? I have no idea. Nobody does.”  
Aveline’s taut stance relaxed a little after a few moments, until finally she pulled herself back across the desk and sheathed her sword.  
“Anyway,” she said, finally wresting her attention from Cole. “These are the resources we’ve gathered.” She motioned at the stacks of books on her desk, and the assorted loose papers. I leafed through some of the parchment, noticing a common theme—dragons. Dragons reared back on their hind legs belching fire, scientific drawings of dragons, sketches that bordered entire pieces of paper. One in particular appeared to be an alchemical recipe. I wondered what Dagna would make of it, and slipped it into a pocket once Aveline had paced around me to stand at the door.  
Everything written in the letters was nonsensical. I began to suspect this Endreth just scrawled gibberish until his followers went insane enough to do as he said. All the tomes on the desk were pristine, leather bound, pages still pliable as I turned them. Genitivi’s Grimoire. Common Cults of Thedas. Tevinter God Cults.  
“Aveline,” I said. She looked queryingly at me. “Where did you get these books?”  
“The viscount’s collection.”  
“You mean the one in Hightown? Popular books published by renowned authors?” The one that the Qunari mostly destroyed?  
“Yes, of course,” Aveline said. She seemed annoyed.  
I chuckled. “Let me guess, you’ve found basically nothing in any of these.”  
Aveline frowned. “My research hasn’t been fruitful, no.”  
“You can be so naïve.” I sighed. “It’s cute.”  
Her frown intensified. “Please enlighten me.”  
“You’re looking in the wrong place. These books talk about big, dramatic cults. The Tevinter god cults that lit half Minrathous on fire. Cults that plotted to assassinate Orlesian emperors.”  
“Cults that did assassinate Orlesian emperors,” Fenris added.  
“We’re looking for a sneaky little cult of ordinary men murdering people in Lowtown. Not that glamorous.”  
Aveline quirked an eyebrow. “And what would you suggest?”  
“The Black Emporium,” I said.  
“I’m certain I’ll be stabbed immediately if I enter that part of town,” Aveline said.  
“Whatever happened to your sense of adventure? Used to be if we didn’t get stabbed while investigating something, it probably wasn’t worth our time.” I laughed. “Fine, me and Broody and Cole will go. Where d’you suppose your lackeys put my Qunari?”  
She looked at me critically. “I’d say ‘in the ground where he belongs’ if he weren’t your friend. So instead I’ll say—“  
A many-voiced shout of outrage from down the hall and Aveline threw open her door. We piled out of her office and found the gaggle of bored-looking guards violently repulsing Adaar. He stood head and shoulders higher than every one of them, but refused to fight them, just stood there with his arms raised looking a little puzzled. Yep. That was my Qunari, alright.  
“Hey, boys,” I said, walking toward them and smiling placatingly. “Don’t you recognize your Inquisitor? His Magnificent Holiness, the Herald of Andraste?”  
Adaar dropped me the most unamused look in his repertoire, and I shrugged. The guards turned and saw Aveline standing behind me looking similarly unamused, and instantly they ceased grappling with Adaar. Apparently news of the Inquisition hadn’t traveled to the Marches—or, more likely, it had, and nobody really cared. Marchers are notoriously difficult to impress.  
I patted Adaar on the arm as we bid Aveline farewell and left the Viscount’s keep. The plan: Go to the Black Emporium and see if Xenon, that masterpiece amalgam of every nightmare anyone had ever had, either had a tome with more arcane information, or could point us in the direction of one.  
The reality: Cole started to go a little insane.  
We reached Darktown and the bowels of the city closed around us. The folks of Lowtown were my kith and kin, but the people in Darktown were downright scary, even to me. And I noticed distinctly when I began to see people who weren’t there. Oh, they were very present when I noticed them lowering at me from the filthiest corners of the alleyways—but I went to point one out to Adaar and nothing was there.  
I kept it to myself. Walked a little faster, you know. No sense in dragging the others into my psychosis.  
“Endreth says we have to ignore the pull of the Deep Roads,” Cole muttered from where he walked alongside me. “But I can’t ignore it anymore, I can’t, I—something inside her whispers and whines, it’s constant, catching on the corners of her conscious. She thinks—here it is, here lies the abyss, she’s ready to go. She knows it’ll be forever in the darkness. It’s what she wants.”  
Fenris, who walked a little ways off from our little cluster, drew up and turned back to look at Cole with cold consternation in his eyes. The sight of him unnerved me—I grabbed onto Adaar’s arm and the Qunari thrust me off and took one quick step in front of me.  
“Varric,” Cole said, tugging at my sleeve. Again he had that drawn look, as though something were actively pulling the life out of him. “Varric, they’re just humans. It’s not them that cause the noises. They don’t sing, Varric, it’s the darkness that sings.”  
I couldn’t believe all of this was happening now, lit by the particular orange-brown light of Darktown, one of the area’s filthy drug-addled markets serving as a backdrop.  
“Cole,” I said. I couldn’t tell what bothered me about a man I’d spotted browsing at one of the carts—everyone in Darktown looks like they’re up to something, but this guy was acting crazy. Like, put together a lineup of ten people in this marketplace and ask me ‘which one of these people is involved in a crazy mystery cult that seems to make everyone interested in it go absolutely stark mad,’ and I’d choose him every time.  
I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I could tell Cole was struggling, fighting whatever unseen force preyed on him. But I trusted him, and Maker forgive me, I needed him to help me.  
I trusted him. I said it again in my head and stared into the kid’s wide, pale eyes. I pointed (discreetly—as a general rule, people in Darktown dislike being implicated in any way) at the guy I’d noticed in the market.  
“Has he noticed us?” I asked. Cole looked toward the man and tilted his head. He’d told us before that he could sense and give voice to pain—if it hurt, he heard it. But I’d noticed his other abilities before—Cole could slay a man before he’d even noticed us, and he’d told me it was because he could tell where their attention lingered. Besides, being invisible to most people you meet probably makes you pretty good at noticing when people can see you.  
“No,” Cole said. “He’s—everything about him hurts, his humanity hinging on a hum. He wakes up and his brain is filled with songs, he doesn’t want it anymore, but every time he tries to leave, the songs pull him back.”  
My mind raced, trying to cobble together some kind of a plan. Literally any kind of a plan would do. I didn’t have very high standards when it came to strategies, right now. I just needed this guy and I needed him to not turn into dust, or smoke, or a goddamn handful of moths. Just as I’d worked out an elaborate scheme that involved Adaar, me, a long cloak, and a cat, the man looked up from his browsing. I ducked immediately behind Adaar (yes, great camouflage, because all he’ll see is the giant Qunari and that’s not suspicious at all), but Cole looked at me and shook his head. Still hadn’t noticed us. Off he went, stumbling, shaking his head, scratching at his arms. He turned down an alleyway to the right and I slid out from behind Adaar, walked past Fenris and up the moldering wooden stairs into the market.  
I browsed my way through the market, trying to stay inconspicuous while simultaneously aware of how impossible that was. Maybe at least Cole would be intangible to most of these people, so the addition of a ghost boy in our ranks wouldn’t be noticed. As soon as we were clear, I met Cole’s eyes and pulled close to the dusty brown wall of a building beside the alley Shifty Man had ducked down. Cole continued on, and I found after a moment that I couldn’t see him anymore. He’d blinked out, and I hadn’t even noticed. Like watching a spider climb a wall and it falls but you’re not paying attention, so all you see is that the spider is gone.  
I heard a gasp, quickly silenced, and poked my head around the wall. Adaar, lacking my subtlety, jogged up to the mouth of the alley, armor jingling. Fenris followed, that madness not quite gone from his eyes.  
Cole had the guy with one arm around his chest and the other holding a dagger to his throat. He looked pleased with himself, almost smiling. Shifty Cult Man struggled a little, and I motioned for Cole to keep him still as I approached.  
I edged forward, halfway expecting the guy to burst into a flock of geese or an army of nugs or something, given Adaar’s experience. Instead, he stared defiantly at a point several feet over my head and went limp in Cole’s arms. That’s when I noticed the runes carved deep into his flesh—just scars by now, jagged and pale enough to avoid easy notice. I reached forward and snatched a packet of papers out of the guy’s coat pocket.  
“You want to tell me who you are?” I said, rifling through the pages frantically, hoping they would prove this was, in fact, a Shifty Cult Man and not just a regular Shifty Man liable to go to the guardsmen after being apprehended and robbed by a famous author.  
“I am… a fire,” he whispered, still staring over my head. “I am afire.”  
“Here lies the abyss,” Cole said, staring straight at me, that strange glazed look coming back over his eyes. “Here it is, one step further and I’ll be there, one step—no more call, Endreth, no more spiders in your brain. How can it be bad? How can anything that makes me live longer be bad?”  
I tore my eyes away and found it, amongst four pages of utter nonsense and drawings of dragons. The Suns meet beneath the sun’s sister and they always meet in the darkest place in Darktown, where the stars are at your feet. I mean, basically more utter nonsense, but ‘the Suns’ sounded feasibly like the name of a cult, and ‘the darkest place in Darktown’ was definitely a place.  
“Thanks, Shifty Cult Man,” I said, tucking his papers into my pocket alongside the alchemical recipe I’d, uh, borrowed from Aveline. “You can turn into a swarm of bees now.”  
“Please don’t encourage him,” Adaar said pitifully from behind me.  
But Cole tightened his hold, eyes growing frantic. Why couldn’t he stare at someone else and talk like a lunatic? Fenris was standing right there.  
“The call is everywhere inside me, it’s—it itches, Endreth, but the more I scratch at it the deeper it grows. Why didn’t we hear it before? Why is it calling both of us now? Why do I want to die?”  
“Hey, kid—“ I took a step backward and Fenris glanced toward me, hand on the hilt of his sword. Okay, right now Cole was second on my list of ‘people not to turn my back on,’ and Fenris was first, because while Cole was basically a child armed with daggers, Fenris was a full-grown man with a two-handed sword and the ability to plunge his hands directly through flesh and bone.  
“I am a fire,” said Shifty Cult Man. “I am afire. I am—far from home.” He wrenched one arm away from Cole’s waning hold and slapped two fingers onto the scarred runes on his other arm, and his body burst into a swarm of flies. They rushed past and around us and I stood and stared at Cole, who shook his head and looked startled.  
“The dark is a wolf that runs from the fire,” said Cole. “I am a fire.” He stepped forward and pushed himself against me, wrapping his arms tight around me and pressing his face into my shoulder. I’m not going to lie, I sort of assumed he was also going to stab me after how crazy he’d been, how susceptible he seemed to the influence of the cult that Aveline and Fenris had discussed. But no stabbing happened, and after a second I hugged him back.  
“Varric, I’m scared,” he said.  
“I know, kid.” What I didn’t say—I was scared, too. Scared brainless that following Hawke would mean all of us going insane.  


***  


I think, out of your average sample of people living in Thedas, I’ve had a greater exposure to madness than most. It’s made me a little nervous on the subject, to be honest. I’m mostly a pretty stable sort of guy, with a couple of sore subjects—Hawke’s love life, my family, the real Bianca. Or—the living Bianca. I consider my crossbow to be the real Bianca. But after Bartrand, after the guy who killed Hawk’s mom and sewed her together with a handful of other corpses, after Meredith and Orsino and Sampson and all the rest of them—  
Shit. It’s scary. These are all people who didn’t know they were crazy. They probably thought we were insane. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be to think you’re the only one trying to save the world? To be the only one who perceives a threat like blood mages in Kirkwall (which, to Meredith’s credit, were kind of a problem)—the only one willing to turn into an abomination to defeat the templars and save your mage brothers, like Orsino? All of them thought they were doing what was right.  
What if that’s me, someday? What if I get roped into something less black and white than the Inquisition fighting Corypheus? What if, when I die, people consider it a victory?  
I didn’t want to be in Darktown anymore, after our confrontation with Shifty Cult Man. Actually, I didn’t want to be in Kirkwall at all. I wanted to be back at Skyhold, sat in front of the fire, playing Wicked Graces. I wanted out of this damn city with its history of occult violence. It was a strange feeling, not one I’m accustomed to—my entire being rejecting the circumstances we’d landed in. I felt flighty, nerves frayed, nervous from having to always watch Fenris at my back. He’d been around this shit much longer than me and Adaar. Cole seemed to be succumbing to the madness at a much increased rate, but I flat out refused to believe he’d deny his nature enough to really harm me.  
Funny, when I’d been pretty certain he was about to stab me on a couple of occasions so far. Easy to trust someone when he’s walking calmly beside you.  
I didn’t want to be in Darktown anymore, but the thought of Hawke unearthing all of this alone made me forge on. I couldn’t really blame Fenris for not pushing her harder for information—I knew how she could be. But I still blamed him. I wondered how she’d gone about all of this—probably with a lot more thundering after cult members and a lot less stealth and subtlety.  
And with a lot more stark, raving insanity. Aveline believed exposure to the cult had caused her guardsmen to go mad, and I could see a sort of fragmentary darkness lurking behind Fenris’ stare. By the time Hawke had gotten close enough to the cult to find out whatever had driven her immediately from Kirkwall, she must have been having trouble.  
I met Adaar’s eyes as we walked, took solace in the steady, quiet confidence in his red-rimmed golden eyes. No trace of madness. I had a theory developing in the back of my brain about the rate of madness and the person’s connection to the Fade—by this theory, I would be relatively immune—but I couldn’t work out why the Suns could influence a person more who had a deeper correlation to the realm of dreams.  
“Where’s the darkest place in Darktown?” I asked nobody in particular. And of course Cole answered, reinstating himself as the reigning champion of answering rhetorical questions with a smart-ass response.  
“It isn’t night,” he said, a fact which was always debatable in Darktown. The entire place was like the creepy spider-infested cellar carved directly out of the earth. Only a sort of strained orange light filtered down from above at any point during the day. “The note said under the sun’s sister, which is the moon, but it isn’t night.”  
“Cole,” I said. “Do you want to crash a meeting of this cult we know next to nothing about, aside from the fact that the mere mention of their society can drive people insane?”  
“No,” he said.  
“Then we’ll go when they’re not there.” I shook my head, forging ahead a little, climbing a flight of rotting wooden stairs and noticing a hunched shack crouched off into a corner. Darktown was full of them—tiny little houses that had been abandoned and left to slowly collapse. This one was different, though, in that something had ripped a hole in its roof, and a drain pipe from somewhere in the upper city deposited an occasional rivulet of water down through the schism.  
I glanced around, found the area entirely abandoned. This was a part of Darktown I’d not frequented—not to say I’d frequented many locales in this, the least desirable district in Kirkwall, but I’d never done business here, never even come here with Hawke. It stank of old sewage and decaying fish. Somehow I suspected the odor might have something to do with the area’s vacuity.  
I walked to the building and pushed open the door. Nothing inside but the bombination of countless insects—just the main room and a door off to the side. I stepped forward and directly into a vast puddle. Pulling my foot out, I swore and then swore again when I lost my balance and had to forcefully stomp back into the water to regain stability.  
Adaar walked right past me into the middle of the puddle, until light from the impromptu skylight overhead illuminated him in a ghastly shade of orange.  
“Where the stars are at your feet,” he said. “Varric, this is it.”  
I exhaled and, fighting back my disgust, waded up beside him. Yep—I looked up and glimpsed a rare patch of sky. Right now it was high and pale blue, the sun beating down across Kirkwall, but once night fell the stars would reflect into the water. Clever. Kind of a disgusting place to assemble a cult, but who was I to judge?  
Had Hawke made her way here and found something? The thought unnerved and thrilled me—if I could wrap up this investigation and be on my way to finding my friend in under two days, I would consider myself a hero. Hell, I’d write my next book about myself. So I squelched through the water to the side door and pulled it open. It glided through the water, admitting me into a room that stood a crucial few inches higher, so that the water remained only in the main room.  
I stepped gratefully onto the dry ground, finding my boots a pound heavier with the water I’d picked up in the other room. The air closed around me when I entered, the atmosphere growing taut and dark and grim. Pages rustled from somewhere within and I startled backward. In the same moment the door glided back through the water and edged shut, so that I only realized it had closed once the latch clicked.  
Shit.  
I whirled and thudded both fists against the door. It refused to give, so I jumped back and whipped Bianca off of my back, jamming a fistful of bolts into her waiting maw. The heavy rasp of breathing from somewhere in the room startled me until I realized it was my own—distorted and unrecognizable. With no windows, no light illuminated the room; I stood still for a full minute before my eyes began to adjust.  
I took a broad step forward, thrusting Bianca into the darkness, my breath catching. Another step. My knee knocked into something low and stationary—all the breath left my lungs and my heart seized before I managed to calm myself. Pulse thudding in my ears, I swallowed and groped about for the top of what I thought was a table. Again that rustle of paper, only this time I’d caused it—I closed my hand around a book and lifted it close enough to my face that I could verify… exactly nothing. All I could discern in the pitch black was that it resembled a book.  
Good enough for me.  
I backed up, one careful step at a time, until I backed into the door, Bianca still poised to unleash hell into the darkness. Then, in one quick motion, I dropped the book into my coat pocket, secured Bianca back over my shoulder, and flung myself around. I threw myself at the door and banged on it with both fists, only this time I didn’t stop, raising a ruckus that sounded somehow muffled in the room.  
Apparently it didn’t sound muffled in the main room, because after a couple of seconds that felt like a damn eternity, Adaar wrenched the door open and I fell into his arms. I don’t mean that to sound dramatic—I literally fell through the doorway and directly into his waiting arms. We were like a couple from one of my romances. Cassandra would have approved.  
“Thanks,” I said. The Qunari pushed me back onto my feet and I stepped back into the water, wiping the gallon of sweat from my brow. “I found something. Let’s get the hell out of here.”  


***  


“I’ve been thinking,” Adaar said, after we’d safely navigated our way out of Darktown and back to Lowtown. Outside, the dusty sky fractured with a thousand shades of purple and blue, dusk falling as though someone had tossed a blanket over the city. We sat in our room in the Hanged Man, me on the floor against the wall and Adaar across from me on the bed. Cole had vanished a little while ago—I’d stopped noticing him somewhere between the Suns’ hideout and Lowtown. It always made me feel terrible, even though I suspected sometimes he did it on purpose, since becoming more human had ostensibly made it more difficult for him to do it by accident.  
“Don’t hurt yourself,” I said half-heartedly, fidgeting with the unopened book in my lap.  
“When we were in the alley with that guy—“  
“Shifty Cult Man,” I reminded him.  
“When we were in the alley with Shifty Cult Man, Cole was on and on about a call. What if he was talking about the Call?”  
That got my attention. My head snapped up and I met Adaar’s eyes.  
“I mean, it was all the abyss and a call and death. It makes sense, right?”  
“So are all the Suns wardens?” I asked, scratching at my brow.  
Adaar laughed. “That guy we met in Darktown—“  
“—Shifty Cult Man—“  
“Shifty Cult Man was not a warden. You remember the guys we fought at Adamant? Shifty Cult Man was so not a warden.”  
“Those guys were also pretty heavily under Corypheus’ influence,” I said.  
“Corypheus, who made them hear the Call constantly.”  
I narrowed my eyes, trying to think. What were the implications here, if wardens were involved? Had Corypheus’ constant call for the wardens to travel to the Deep Roads to give up their lives had more of a far-flung effect than we’d anticipated? How did this relate to the Suns at all?  
“This Endreth,” Adaar said slowly. “What do we know about him?”  
I flipped open the book in my lap. It fell open easily to one page, and as I flipped through the rest, I noticed that this page was the only one written upon. Not a very economical way to use a journal, but different strokes for different folks, I guess.  
“In my moments of clarity, I blame Huna for everything,” I read from the journal. “I can’t tell my moments of clarity from my moments of madness, anymore. But I have to remember her name—Huna, Huna, who unmade me. I heard the Call before but it’s far stronger, now. Have to fight it. Close my eyes and I can see spiders in my brain, clawing out through my eye sockets when I’m dead. I dream every night of the Deep Roads and I wake up screaming.  
I don’t want to die. Neither of us wants to die. Calypso says she’ll die, soon, that she wants to die, and I tell her over and over that I have a different way.  
Ramiroth, lord of the sun and stars. Not of the moon, though. Peculiar. And then there’s just a drawing of a dragon.” I turned the book around so Adaar could see.  
“So Endreth is a warden.”  
We shared a somber look, neither of us really knowing what this meant for our quest. I guess it meant that Hawke had gotten herself embroiled in some pretty heavy shit. She probably hadn’t realized it until too late—until she was too addled by madness to turn back.  
“I know Huna,” I said, a flash of inspiration striking me. “I mean—Hawke did, at least. It’s in the second letter she left me. Huna and Salami.” I pulled the letter in question from my pocket (I was basically a walking reference folder by now). “Huna and Salome.”  
“Now what?” Adaar asked. I’d never seen a Qunari look disheveled until I met Adaar. He’d mastered the look, truly.  
“Now we can sleep,” I said. “And in the morning, we’re really going to the Black Emporium.”  


***  


We ducked through the doorway of the Black Emporium and the scent of incense and age became immediately overpowering. It smelled like a library, if that library were miles underground, thousands of years old, and filled with candles. Adaar crouched in behind me and I led the way down the wood-plank walkway, each step creaking. The various totems hanging from the ceiling—skulls of every animal imaginable, ribbons, scraps of fabric—brushed my shoulders and face, and gradually my eyes adjusted to seeing only by the light of the few torches lining the walkway.  
“Welcome… to the Black Emporium!” The voice filled every cavity of me, deep and resonant and enormous. I gritted my teeth and Adaar flinched hard, grabbed me, and transported me behind him. He leapt forward, unsheathed his sword, and dropped his shield onto the wood at his feet.  
Yep. That kind of battle readiness was exactly why Adaar had always been my favorite warrior. You didn’t get that kind of reaction time out of a human, or this amount of equipment out of an elf.  
“Calm down, Pup,” I said, ducking around the seething Qunari and continuing down the walkway with a brazen look back at him. “It’s just Xenon. You’ll get used to the volume.”  
“I doubt that,” Adaar contested. But he sheathed his sword and followed me, nonetheless.  
“Herbs and resources in the box to your right,” the voice bellowed out again. “Bones and body parts to your left, haha!”  
Adaar crouched as the walkway opened up into the Emporium’s central room. His head moved from side to side and I watched him, needing to witness his reaction once he lay eyes on Xenon. All things considered, it would be relatively simple to not see the antiquarian at all, given the vast profusion of strange objects laying around his shop. But I remembered my reaction the first time I’d seen him—Hawke had almost screamed, a noteworthy reaction out of someone ordinarily so stoic and controlled. And I’d just laughed and laughed, tearfully assuring Xenon that I laughed at Hawke and not at him.  
There—there it was. Adaar’s crouch drew taut and wary, and then he jerked backward and blundered into the wooden railing lining the central platform of the shop. I couldn’t blame him—Xenon looked like a ridiculous charicature a child might draw of one of the monsters out of their nightmares. Leathery grey, seated permanently in his throne in the center of the room, many arms twisted and distorted as though he were holding several different conversations with his hands. I’d never really understood the guy—he was alive, I’d come to understand, just years and years older than any man had any right to be. Why he remained frozen in place in the center of the Emporium, mouth unmoving while he spoke, remained a mystery to me.  
Hell, as long as he could function as my expert on the dark and grim history of the Suns, I didn’t care if Xenon consisted of several druffalo tied together.  
“Hello, Inquisitor!” Xenon roared, the voice coming simultaneously from every corner of the room. Adaar blenched backward again, abutting against the railing so that the wood sounded dangerously close to splintering. “Every manner of legendary weapon is for sale, if you… have the coin.”  
The Qunari sputtered, looked at me, looked quickly back to Xenon as though afraid to let the twisted construct out of his sight.  
“Actually,” I intervened, stepping forward even though I knew Xenon’s fixed expression would not move to see me. I couldn’t decide if it would be creepier if it did. “We’re here for some information.”  
“Very well!” The voice rolled out and then went silent. “That will be five sovereigns!”  
“I haven’t even asked a question,” I muttered, digging my coin out of my pocket. I parsed out five sovereigns and walked closer, narrowing my eyes and dropping the coins into a hand. What happened if someone tried to shoplift? Xenon was the only occupant of the lightless store. More questions I figured I probably didn’t want to know the answer to, especially if the answer involved Xenon lurching out of his seat and crawling after the brigand like some kind of giant nightmare spider.  
“We need to know about the Suns. And a woman named Huna, if you know anything.”  
A dry laugh echoed throughout the room. “Of COURSE I know, dwarf! The Suns, you say? Hrrrmm.” A long, weighted pause. I fidgeted. I hated it in here—I’m a surfacer for Andraste’s sake, I don’t like being enclosed in dark, earthen dens any more than stone dwelling dwarves like standing beneath the open sky. Finally: “I’m surprised you know the name! The Suns formed following the end of the first Blight!”  
My mouth opened and I couldn’t quite get it shut. The first Blight? That was in—  
“The first mention of the Suns is in -200 Ancient,” Xenon said. “But mention of the society in documents of the time is unheard of! It slips through history unnoticed.”  
“Why after the first Blight?” I asked. A burgeoning epiphany in the back of my mind told me that I ought to know, or to be able to put something together.  
“The Wardens,” Adaar said, edging forward away from the railing. “It formed in the Wardens.”  
“Indeed, my fine horned friend! The Suns formed among Tevinter conscripts to the Wardens, often unwilling. After the Blight, their purpose vanished, and some began to hear the Call.”  
“So?”  
“So, they unearthed tales of the Tevinter old god of the sun and stars: Ramiroth. Their society formed around the worship of this idol of the sun, in order to protect them from the Call and the darkness of the Deep Roads.”  
Sadness stole across me and I tried to remember Cole’s words. I didn’t have a clue whose words he’d been mimicking, but whoever it had been had been hearing the Call, and hearing it deep. Same with Endreth. Something about the idea of a group of scared conscripts—Maker, what had they seen during the first Blight?—worshipping a Tevinter old god out of a simple fear of the dark made me cringe.  
“But mention of the cult is sparse. It vanishes completely by -190 Ancient! However, a cult purportedly adopting the same name appeared in Kirkwall a number of years ago! And that leads me to Huna.” The voice cleared its throat in a series of hacking coughs. Silence. I rolled my eyes and pushed my hand back into my coat pocket, digging out five more sovereigns to deposit into the waiting hand. How convenient that one of Xenon’s hands had happened to mummify with the palm up.  
“The cult’s presence was traced back to a woman named Huna! She was driven from the city and is said to have thrown herself from the cliffs up the Wounded Coast.”  
The silence lasted so long I wondered if this information were especially pricy.  
“Wait, that’s it?” I said.  
“There is no further mention of her!”  
“How long ago is ‘a number of years’?”  
“7:30 Storm!”  
I had that same problem with my mouth dropping open. What the hell? Endreth had mentioned Huna repeatedly in his journal. Hawke had mentioned her in her letter. But 7:30 Storm—she wouldn’t even be dead, she’d be so dead the earth would have forgotten the taste of her bones.  
“That’s impossible,” I said into the ensuing silence.  
“Nothing’s impossible, dwarf!” Xenon bellowed. “Especially not with one of my alchemical poultices!”  
The voice continued to rant and rave at one thousand decibels, but I walked back to where Adaar leaned somewhat more casually against the railing.  
“So the Suns started in the Wardens generations ago,” I said. “And then cropped back up in Kirkwall, of all places. And the only link we have to learning why threw herself off a cliff in 7:30 fucking Storm.”  
“I guess we find the cliff,” Adaar said. I suspected he would posit any idea so long as it meant vacating the premises. I shrugged—it was as good an idea as any, when we didn’t have a single other lead.  
“Bye, Xenon,” I muttered as we left, barely audible over the antiquarian still extolling the virtues of his poultices, his legendary weapons, and the barrel of socks he always kept by the door.  


***  


Back up the Wounded Coast, then. We left the city and began walking, following the main path this time—it proved no less tortuous and confusing than the smuggler’s trail we’d been on previously, but it involved less beating through the brush.  
“What happened with the Qunari in the city?” Adaar asked from behind me, grunting and laboring up a steep incline. “Nobody seems to care if I’m the Inquisitor.”  
“They got stranded,” I said, pausing to wipe the sweat off my brow. The sun had been welcome at first, after the dank closeness of the Black Emporium, but the coast provided very little in the way of shelter and the heat had begun to take its toll on both of us. “And it’s kind of a long story, but a friend of mine stole a book of uh… historical significance to them. So they couldn’t leave until they got it back. Hawke—well, she sympathized with them. The Arishok was almost her friend.”  
Almost. I remembered too vividly her livid rants in the Hanged Man on how the Arishok’s favored answer to any question was ‘no.’  
“It got bad. The Qunari lost their patience. They attacked the city—lit everything on fire, killed a bunch of people, the whole nine. Hawke killed the Arishok and they left.”  
Adaar reached the crest of the hill and leaned his weight onto me with a forearm on my shoulder. “Oh.”  
But I couldn’t let it rest at that, not after looking over at him and seeing how utterly sad he looked. Must be tough to idolize a people who exclude you—hell, the Qunari didn’t just exclude Tal-Vashoth, they reviled them. Some Vashoth took pride in this, but Adaar didn’t.  
“You alright, Pup?”  
“Is this what being a Qunari is like?” he said, ducking his head and glancing at me. “People in Kirkwall aren’t afraid of me, they hate me.”  
I chuckled. Cullen and Josephine had worked vigilantly to shield Adaar from the barrage of hatred coming his way from Thedas at large once he’d been proclaimed the Inquisitor. Obviously it’d worked. At first I hadn’t advocated protecting him—you couldn’t look at Adaar and not see a strong, capable individual. But as I’d gotten to know him, I had to admit that Curly and Ruffles running interference was probably best. The Vashoth next to me was fragile—he wanted desperately to be liked by everyone around him. And it was easy enough to like him, once you got to know him.  
But he’d been raised in an agrarian group of Vashoth and then joined a mercenary company of Vashoth. He hadn’t exactly been exposed to the outside world enough to understand who he was the instant he left the company of his own people. He was a brutal monster, member of a race that had damned near conquered Thedas. If Thedosians are good at one thing, it’s holding a mean grudge.  
“Pup,” I said. “People everywhere hate you. Trust me.”  
He quirked an eyebrow and didn’t look comforted.  
“Point is, you did an amazing thing. You’re doing amazing things. That’s what matters.”  
But as I said the words I thought back to what I’d considered before—that everyone we’d fought to date had believed they were committed to movements that would change Thedas for the better. I’d had a growing malaise as we’d left Kirkwall, since long periods of walking in silence tended to promote me thinking about things I shouldn’t think about.  
I hated that we’d uncovered what we’d uncovered about Endreth and the Suns, about their origins. I kept imagining the hand behind the pen that had scribed that note in the journal I’d swiped. That was a scared man. A Warden who kept hearing the Call when his heart told him it wasn’t time. I had to keep reminding myself that we were doing this for Hawke—because, being who I am, my first instinct was to unearth this cult’s full, dirty history, and fix it.  
Unfortunately, ‘looking for Hawke’ had turned into ‘dig into this cult’s history with my bare hands and come away scarred.’  
“Look,” I said, because Adaar had taken to staring at the path beneath our feet, looking deeply troubled. “Maybe you should focus less on being Qunari and just focus on being Adaar.”  
He smiled. His arm shifted and he pulled me into a hug that smelled like sweat and was vaguely sticky. We weren’t really a self-conscious bunch.  
We continued up the path. Xenon had mentioned a cliff up the coast, and I thought I knew exactly which cliff he referenced—it’d been notorious for its dark aura when I’d been young in Kirkwall, but I hadn’t heard any stories about it recently. Mostly I think people were afraid of it because it was pretty easy to fall off of it—the edges were deceptive, the side of the mountain eroded by continual battering by the Waking Sea so that a step too far out could cause your footing to crumble into the water. It seemed, if I remembered right, the sort of a place that could’ve seen a witch driven out of Kirkwall throw herself to her death. Not the most charming place to visit, but on we went.  
The heat weighed on me like something physical, and finally I gave up and took my coat off, slinging it over my arm. Adaar didn’t have the option of removing his armor—what use would he be then?—but he trudged along beside me as the vegetation along the path thinned, and turned into occasional patches of scrub. Clouds had come rolling in from the south, and in the distance I could see rain blowing across the sea. Gauging by the sun, it couldn’t have been later than mid-afternoon by now—we’d been walking for hours, and I was beginning to feel like we might as well find a place in the shade of a rock outcropping and prepare to spend the night.  
“Varric,” Adaar said, low in his throat, and pointed. Ahead of us, down the path a bit, was a vast plateau. The path ended there, spilling out into a jagged cliff that jutted out over the mountain. The land curved so that Kirkwall was across from us, the dark city on its dark cliffs looking ominous with the rainclouds on the horizon behind it.  
Adaar drew his sword, exhaustion clear on his face. On the path in front of the plateau, a pack of bandits had converged on—someone. I squinted and after a moment realized that it was a girl—short dark curls bobbing around her as she swept in short circles, jabbing and clubbing with a staff. A mage?  
“She’s afraid she’ll be here forever,” Cole said from abruptly right next to me. I admit to jumping away from him. If pushed, I might admit to screaming a little. I rammed my shoulder into Adaar, who grunted and then moved forward at a heavy trot, pulling his shield in front of him. Usually he would’ve been careening toward the battle, roaring and banging on his shield, but I guess he was tired.  
I glanced at Cole as I pulled Bianca off my back.  
“She stares at the city while her mother sleeps and she longs to be there, but mother always says no, and mother always knows best,” the kid said. He frowned, brow knitting, and drew both his daggers before following Adaar. I myself jogged forward a few paces as well, ducking behind a boulder at the side of the path and staring along Bianca’s topline, taking aim.  
Adaar took off one of the bandit’s heads with an easy swing of his sword and then they were really in it. Cole eviscerated a man with his two knives scissored through the guy’s back. Scream, blood spat from the mouth, and he fell—immediately I locked onto the guy behind him and loosed a bolt.  
I laughed as it struck home. Right between the eyes. The girl whirled, screaming as she slammed her staff into the ground. Lightning split out from her, striking the remaining bandits (and also Adaar, a little). One collapsed, and Cole got the other clean in the throat as he staggered. Nice. I debouched from my cover, strolled down the path as I stowed Bianca once more. I figured that since the girl hadn’t continued to use her weapon once the bandits were felled, she probably understood we weren’t a threat to her.  
“Are you alright?” I heard Adaar ask her. He bent over her, concern written across his expression, but the girl fixed ice-chip blue eyes on me and scowled.  
“You almost fucking killed me,” she said, stalking forward with her staff raised menacingly. “What are you about, dwarf?”  
I stopped as she neared, spreading my hands outward and grinning at her.  
“My apologies, ser witch. However, I’m certain I wasn’t that close to hitting you. I tend to, you know, aim before I fire.”  
“Aim better next time,” she snapped, dropping her staff onto the earth. Sparks shot outward, but if she intended it to be a threatening gesture, it fell short. I’ve dealt with enough mages in enough contexts that I no longer fear them. This girl looked like the sort who could always find something to be irritated with—she didn’t look like the sort to electrocute me outright for firing a bolt slightly askew while saving her life.  
Her scowl deepened and she turned away, seeming a little restless as she paced back toward Adaar. She stopped right in front of him, staring up his vastness directly into his eyes. The Inquisitor almost took a step backward—I saw his heel begin to lift—before he stood his ground. Been a while since anyone would meet his eyes.  
“What on earth are you supposed to be?” she demanded.  
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. She whipped a withering glare back toward me as I walked toward her.  
“Slow down there, honey,” I said. Her dark eyebrows lowered dangerously over her eyes. “Sorry. Uh. Slow down there, Her Most Perilous Mageness. Can we introduce ourselves?”  
She crossed her arms. “Yes.”  
“Okay. I’m Varric Tethras—“ I paused heavily, waiting for some kind of realization to light in her eyes. You never knew—sometimes it did. It didn’t. I sighed. “—author and crossbowman extraordinaire. This is Sciath Adaar, Inquisitor. And… Cole?” I looked at her probingly and she lifted an eyebrow before glancing at Cole directly. Okay, she could see him.  
“My name is Salome,” she said. “Thank you.” She said the last two words so grudgingly I thought they must’ve physically hurt her.  
“We’re looking for the place where Huna died,” I said. “Do you know it?”  
She looked befuddled, then bemused, and then just shook her head. “Yes.”  
Turning, she walked up the path toward the plateau and the nauseating drop below. As the flat, barren earth opened around us, I noticed a cave on the landward side of the clearing. A powerful smell of herbs blew from within—it must be a tunnel with an opening somewhere else on the mountain.  
Salome reached the far cliff and gestured out across the sea. She still wore that private smile, and I lifted an eyebrow at her before looking at the water below. My stomach churned and I took a step backward, and she laughed at me a little derisively.  
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. What’s so damned funny?”  
“A lot of people are interested in my mother lately,” she said. She looked at me with a dangerous glint to her eyes and leaned forward over the cliff, pulling a clump of stones from the crumbling soil.  
“Your… mother?”  
“She loves her mother,” Cole said, wandering across the plateau toward us. Salome tossed him a challenging glare, but the kid just stared at her with his wide, ghost-pale eyes, oblivious as usual.  
“The strange thing is,” Salome said, shifting back into her crouch and standing back up slowly, “You and the woman are both looking for the place she died.”  
Out of nowhere, she leapt upward onto the balls of her feet and whipped one of the loose stones at me. I didn’t even know how to react—I’d fought enough reckless lunatics that my reflexes are exceptional, so I just shouted and jumped (so gracefully, I’d like to reinforce) out of the way. Adaar started to draw his sword and stopped after a moment, I guess realizing that nothing serious had transpired—the fool girl had just whipped a rock at me. Out of nowhere.  
Salome spun and slammed her staff into the ground, gripping it with both light, pale hands. Again lightning fulgurated through the air, only now it struck nothing—and abruptly the storm began. The clouds flashed and thunder cracked directly overhead, and rain came down in sheets. I was soaked in seconds, hair washed clean out of its queue, not even a moment to consider putting on my coat. Adaar yelled and Salome laughed in the same instant. She sounded honestly delighted, having the time of her life with her curly hair plastered to her cheeks.  
She raced toward me and I flinched away from her hard.  
“Idiot!” she yelled over the torrential rain. “I’m trying to help!”  
“You just whipped a rock at me!”  
A devilish smile arched across her mouth. She grabbed me by the arm and leapt in the opposite direction, yanking me along with her toward the cave. I mean, I could definitely have protested a little more, but she was a pretty girl towing me toward shelter. I wasn’t about to decline that offer.  
We reached the cave and a second later Adaar ducked beneath the mossy overhang, water dripping from the tips of his gold-plated horns in steady rivulets. Cole slipped in behind him, stood peering around the darkness.  
“She knows someday you’ll leave her,” he said, running his fingers across a patch of orange lichen on the cave’s wall. “She hopes that day never comes.”  
Salome’s smile vanished and she dropped my arm as if she’d just noticed herself clutching to it. She backed into the dim recesses of the cave and abruptly behind her a pale figure rose—a dog. Not a Mabari but tall and thin, with an elegant neck curving up to a slender muzzle. The creature was enormous—half as tall as Salome on four paws.  
And then it was a woman.  
I witnessed no transformation, no sloughing of canine skin giving way to a human shape. I just blinked and saw a woman where the dog had been moments before. I wiped my hair out of my eyes, squinted—she was tall, still a head beneath Adaar, but by far the tallest woman I’d seen. Dressed all in white robes, her white hair fell into a voluminous hood. She regarded me from the shadows with golden eyes that transfixed me. Something about her seemed unnatural, and at the same moment viscerally natural—an aspect of nature incarnate.  
“I get it,” I said. Adaar drew level with me, peering at the pale figure with steady wariness. “It’s funny because Huna’s not dead.”  
“So it would seem,” the woman spoke with a voice like dry leaves across stone. “Why are you here?”  
She spoke with no inflection whatsoever—a voice as crisp and strong as an autumnal wind. I found myself powerfully compelled to tell her the truth, mostly because I honestly feared the consequences of lying.  
“We need to know about Endreth,” I said. “And the Suns.”  
Huna lifted an eyebrow. She stepped forward, and a tongue of lightning licking across the sky illuminated her. She didn’t look old, but she didn’t look young, either—she hovered in the comfortable range of middle-aged. And she creeped me out. I’ve dealt with enough witches in my journeys to identify one when she stepped out of the shadows right in front of me.  
They’re different from mages, somehow. Same magic, different applications. Different rules. I’ve never heard of a witch worried about being an apostate—they flout all of the rules right under the chantry’s nose, and the chantry never seems compelled to do anything. I mean, I wouldn’t do anything either, they usually secret themselves away in the woods or the mountains and prefer to be left alone. I tried to talk to Morrigan on exactly one occasion and quickly deduced that she always would be happier without my company.  
Huna had the same carriage as the rest of the witches I’ve met. That same haughty lack of expression. Same piercing eyes.  
“How is it,” she said, “That I go years without hearing those names, and they return to me now?” She didn’t sound accusatory or angry in the least. Her tone remained oddly placid.  
“Look, I’m going to lay it all out on the table for you, because I really need help here.” I stepped forward, betraying my most base instinct. I clasped my hands and stared her straight in the eyes. “My friend—my best friend—Hawke, she got mixed up in this somehow. Now, she’s kind of a reckless idiot, charges into everything sword first, you know, but I need to find her. Need to.”  
Huna considered me silently. “I met a woman named Hawke,” she said.  
All the air rushed out of me. I felt—relieved? “When!” I shouted the question with maybe too much zeal, and was quick to tone back a little. Huna’s expression didn’t change even given my outburst.  
“Sorry,” I said. “Been a long few days. When did you meet Hawke? What—what did she want to know? How did she find you? Where did she go?” Way to go, Varric. Good job toning that down. You probably don’t look frazzled and insane at all right now.  
A ghost of a smile touched Huna’s lips. “A week ago, perhaps, we saw her. She was searching for the warden Endreth, in order to kill him.”  
“Kill him?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. My goal was to find Endreth and maybe—I don’t know—politely ask him why Hawke had taken off and what she’d been on the tail of. Maybe let Bianca ask him if he proved recalcitrant. Just like Hawke to learn that Endreth was leading a murderous gang in Kirkwall and jump immediately to ‘let’s murder the bastard right back.’  
“Yes,” Huna said. “She was adamant about killing him.”  
I shook my head. “What did you tell her?”  
Huna looked unamused at my questioning, turned her back on me and walked a bit further back into the cave. I noticed Salome standing off to the side, fixing me with something between a glare and a gaze desperately filled with questions.  
“I told her that Endreth is my family,” she said, her voice growing a shade colder. “And that if she wished to kill him, she would find him alone.”  
The plot thickened. “Ah,” I said. “Well, I don’t want to kill Endreth. But I do have questions about him.”  
Huna turned to face me. For the first time, she looked—old. And if she’d been driven from Kirkwall for involvement with the Suns in 7:30 Storm, she was old.  
“Endreth is a good man,” she said. “He is Salome’s father. He is a warden. I will speak no more of him.” She turned away from us and drifted back into the shadows.  
“You may remain here as long as you desire, but we will speak of this no further.” The voice drifted back to me, and dimly I saw the shape of a slender dog vanish into the recesses of the cave.  


***  


The rain had slackened a little by the time Adaar and I finished staring at each other with dead eyes. I poked my head out of the cave and the steady drizzle soaked me through again within a matter of seconds—my hair was sodden, sticking to the back of my neck, and I figured I couldn’t get any more wet.  
“Wait!” said Salome as I stepped out into the rain. She’d stayed at the back of the cave when her mother had left, and now she rushed out and dodged in front of me. I drew up abruptly, opened my mouth with the intention of saying something witty about women always being too eager to be in my presence, but my spirits were too low. I just shrugged.  
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to—figure something out.”  
“Give me some time,” she said, her eyes narrowed, something adamant and desperate about her. I got the sense that she didn’t get out much. “Please. I can help you.”  
“Why?” I knew I sounded blunt. I felt blunt, all my senses muffled by the rain, all my hopes dashed in a few seconds. I’d scarcely dared hope that Huna might somehow still be alive—I’d scarcely dared hope that she might know something about this shit. Turned out both of those hopes were validated, but the witch who’d endured since 7:30 Storm who probably had the exact information I needed to find Hawke wasn’t talking.  
“I—“ She lunged forward and I didn’t even twitch this time. She seized hold of my shoulders and ducked her head to stare feverishly into my eyes. “I can’t be here alone anymore. Please, Varric.”  
I returned her hard stare and I heard Hawke in the back of my mind chiding me for being too empathetic. Probably a valid point—I have trouble watching the suffering of strangers without being moved to help in whatever way I can.  
“Some nights it’s like she’s being smothered, like her mother is holding a pillow over her face, and she wonders what it would be like to jump,” Cole muttered from behind me, his voice just a murmur almost lost beneath the sound of the rain. Shit. No way I could stand up to that.  
“Alright, Zap,” I said, the nickname coming off my tongue without any forethought whatsoever. Hell, what can I say, it’s a gift. “What’s the plan?”  
“Let me talk to her,” she said. “Give me some time.”  
“I can’t,” I said, spreading my hands. “Look, you don’t know her, but Hawke is out there somewhere in Thedas and she’s probably doing something really dumb and reckless while I am standing here having this conversation with you. I need to find out where she is. Yesterday.”  
I pulled away from her and disappointment flashed across her face, which had been hovering a little unnecessarily close to mine. Have I mentioned I thought she was a little sheltered? Girl had no sense of the appropriate distance at which to have a desperate, intense conversation. I started to walk back down the path, squelching in my rain-filled boots.  
“I can find out where my father is,” Salome said, voice carrying toward me down the path.  
I stopped, and Adaar stopped beside me, and we shared a look. We turned back around toward the girl, who smiled a little too triumphantly when she saw us pivot.  
“Do it,” I said. “If you can. And whatever you want is yours.”  
She didn’t say anything, just arched a dark eyebrow. I turned back around and we continued, until I paused and shouted back over my shoulder—  
“And Salome? I promise I won’t hurt him if he doesn’t hurt me first.”  
But if he did something to Hawke, or sent her into some sort of danger, I will eat his boiled organs out of his skull. That part I kept to myself.  
The rain had washed out parts of the path, leaving us to slog through opaque puddles that wet my pants up to my knees and that barely touched Adaar’s shins. Cole danced through the water smiling, spraying muddy flecks of water into my face. Kid had always loved water—constantly wanted to go swimming—and I never stopped wondering why. I’d have to get him on Isabela’s ship sometime. Bet he’d love that.  
Because I was always aware of where Anders was in relation to myself and Hawke, I could almost sense the presence of his cave a ways down the coast. Similarly, I could definitely sense his presence once the mage appeared in front of us, moving through the vegetation, hood drawn up over his head. I noticed after a moment that his hands were shaking, his grip white on his staff.  
“Varric,” he said. His voice shook a little—the kind of tremble I associated with a mage who has utterly spent his reserves of mana. I’d only heard it a few times before—mostly when Dorian had lit everything in the immediate vicinity on fire in order to protect Ellana from a spider, and then spent the next ten minutes cursing at her in every language he knew.  
Anders waved a hand at us, standing upright in spite of his obvious exhaustion. “Varric, come on. There’s—we’ll talk. Come on.”  
Alarmed didn’t even begin to describe my mood. Immediately I knew this had to be a trap—Adaar snarled again, and Cole whispered from where he stood just behind me.  
“They’re brothers in the same way they’re opposites,” he said. “They both sing, but his song—it’s from a different voice.”  
I glanced at him and Cole blinked his pale grey eyes, mouth drawn into a small frown.  
“He took justice and twisted it,” he said. “He killed his friend and used the corpse to kill hundreds. He lives with it every day.” Pause. “He wants to help.”  
That was enough for me. I jogged toward Anders and the blonde mage nodded quickly, before turning and leading us through the vegetation. We diverged from the path and then we diverged from the path I assumed we would take back to the cave. We wound through the trees following nothing besides Anders’ whim, and ended up somewhere far enough inland from the coast that the sound of the ocean dulled a little. The Wounded Coast is all scrub and shale on the cliffs, but head inland and it turns into an innavigable mess of jungle. It was here that Anders led us, until we reached a secluded clearing. The mage stood at the edge of the trees and guided us in before half collapsing beside a fire pit that had clearly been there for a few days.  
The rain pattered onto the broad leaves of the trees surrounding us, dripped down vines and sometimes between the canopy to dapple the earth. The humidity was suffocating—breathing was almost drinking. The air practically shone green, even with the sun lost behind layers and layers of grey cloud. Cole wandered into the clearing, hands finding leaves and vines and at last the trunk of a great tree, one of the dauntingly huge ones that contributed its branches to the uppermost canopy. He stood there, fingers running down the fissures in the ancient bark, while Adaar and I sat down across from Anders.  
“Fenris,”Anders said. He pulled his hood back and he looked even worse than the last time I’d seen him—eyes sunken and dark, lips pale. “Fenris returned to me last night.”  
I lifted an eyebrow. We’d lost track of the elf somewhere in Darktown—I’d halfway assumed he’d gone to see Aveline, or retreated back into his habitual grumpy solitude.  
“Did he—recite you a poem? Help me out here, Blondie.”  
Anders didn’t even feign laughter. “He’s hunting me, Varric.”  
I leapt to my feet only a little slower than if I’d found a spider crawling on me. Adaar was right there with me, just a bit more cumbersome—he rocked forward onto his knees and stamped one foot onto the ground in preparation to rise. Anders lifted his hands to placate us—I was already scanning the jungle for signs of a murderous, insane, lyrium inscribed elf plotting our collective demise.  
“I fought and ran all night,” Anders said. That explained the look. Mages counted on armored allies—they needed a distraction, especially when fighting alone. One mage pitted against one warrior for an entire night would result in assured death for any mage less capable than Anders. “I need to know what’s happening.”  
He clasped his hands and leaned forward, fixing me with a penetrating stare.  
I sighed and shrugged helplessly, taking my time in lowering myself back onto the ground. “Hawke’s in trouble. It’s a long story that I definitely don’t want to tell you—“ Because I was already dealing with Fenris losing his sodding mind, and why would I want to deal with a maddened mage on top of that? No mention of the cult. “—but she and Fenris got involved in something…unsavory. It, uh, got to Fenris. He can’t be trusted.”  
Anders laughed a grim little laugh. “Clearly.” He lifted his eyes and his mouth moved, but it took him a second to ask the question. “You’re handling it, right? You’ll—make sure she’s safe?”  
I couldn’t decide how to react to that—after the afternoon’s crushing disappointment with Huna, I didn’t want to talk about it. But I’m not quite the type to be rude in conversation, not even with someone whose very personality and essence I loathed as much as I loathed Anders’.  
“Yeah, Blondie,” I said. Yes, I will, you great asshole, I’ll take care of it and bring her home and I’ll sweep her off into the countryside and she’ll never think of you again. “I’ll make sure she’s safe.”  
“Let me know if you need help,” he said. He looked like shit and he sounded like he’d swallowed handfuls of sand from the coast, and hell, he must’ve known how I felt about him, but there he went with his desperate sort of selflessness. He glanced over his shoulder with enough intensity to make me a little nervous, then sighed and looked at Adaar as if noticing the massive Qunari for the first time. He fidgeted a little and stood up.  
“Can we speak privately?” he asked me. “I mean no offense, but—“  
“None taken,” Adaar said. “I’ll keep an eye out.”  
I wished the Qunari had taken offense, because the thought of being alone in Anders’ company made me want to be violently ill. Instead, I stood up again. It took me a bit to accomplish vertical again—walking for hours in the heat and then being abruptly soaked by a downpour will do that, I guess. I followed Anders into the trees and we wandered for a few minutes before Anders drew up abruptly, throwing an arm out sideways and catching me in the chest before I plummeted into the chasm that had opened in the earth directly before us. Once confident that I’d seen the fissure and wouldn’t stubbornly trip to my doom, Anders pulled his arm away and pointed downward. I leaned forward as far as I dared—at the bottom of the chasm, a distant stream glittered and flash as the rain struck it. But there was something else, a peculiar glow to the water itself, an orange light that refracted from the surface in spite of the lack of sunlight.  
“It only happens right here,” Anders said, his voice containing a sort of delight I’d not heard from him in years. “The water comes in from the sea but it doesn’t shine like that anywhere else. I’ve looked.”  
I pulled my attention from the water and looked at him instead. I smiled at the awe struck across his tired face—this was the sort of thing that made me lament the friendship I’d always sensed I could’ve had with Anders, had he been… well, anyone but Anders. These moments of childish beatitude made him beautifully human—made it twice as heartbreaking when I watched him destroying himself from the inside out, and taking Hawke with him.  
The smile vanished when he shook his head and glanced back at me.  
“I’m—I’m always here for you, Varric.”  
I stared at him, not knowing how the hell he expected me to respond to that.  
“I think you’re the only one who cares about her more than I do,” he said, very softly, looking quickly back toward the water. “And I know she’ll always choose you first.”  
“This isn’t—about that,” I said. It wasn’t. I found myself growing frustrated, skin burning as I fought the irrational desire to push the idiot mage into the chasm to join his beloved shiny water. I wasn’t looking for Hawke, I wasn’t excluding him from joining me, because I wanted to prove that I cared about her more, or that I knew she’d be with me before she’d be with him. I was doing it because Hawke was my friend and I knew she’d do the same thing to find me.  
Strangely enough, I knew intrinsically that my motivations proved Anders’ point. I did care about her more. He cared about her implications—a woman who’d stood up to the templars in Kirkwall, who’d sided with the mages when nobody else would. She’d had no allies and every advisor she had, myself included, had advocated killing Anders. She’d refused. Hawke wasn’t the woman he loved—she was a goddamn figurehead, an idol, an ideal that he wanted to hold and keep and embody.  
Fuck this guy. But just as I had seriously begun to consider stepping forward and kicking his knees out, he bowed his head, leaned his weight onto his staff.  
“Varric,” he said. “Maker, Varric, I’m so sorry.”  
All the strength went out of him—I watched it. His shoulders slumped, the rest of his composure vanishing as he clutched his staff and pressed his forehead against the wood. And with it went my anger. I didn’t have to ask why he was sorry—shit, I’d seen Kirkwall’s chantry exploding every night in my dreams for a year. He sniffed, and I realized he was crying—he wiped his face on the back of one of his hands and refused to meet my eyes.  
“I don’t regret it,” he said. “I hate that I don’t regret it.”  
“Blondie,” I said. But he shook his head.  
“I hate myself, Varric,” he said, laughing. “Maker, I hate myself so much. But Vengeance won’t let me die. I’ve tried.”  
I swallowed hard, any words I might have spoken dying in my throat. I couldn’t say anything to that. I couldn’t admit how many nights I’d lain awake bathed in sweat wishing Anders had died. Wishing I’d get a letter from Fenris saying that Anders had been found and hanged. But I looked at him now and I knew that this—this not dying, this living in a cave on the coast alone—was a far worse punishment than anything I could’ve ever devised.  
“Why not let him catch you?” I said, the question low in my throat. “Why not fight Fenris and die?”  
He smiled. “Lose to Fenris? Are you insane?”  
“Huh. I see your point.” We spent a long moment with Anders clutching his staff and staring into the shimmering water below. I watched him and then I watched the water, too, feeling oddly tranquil beneath my layer of continual fretting. I couldn’t relax when I knew every pause in my search meant Hawke excavating deeper and deeper into whatever trouble she’d doubtless found, but this—storm grumbling overhead, air thick with humidity, the sound of the water rushing through the chasm beneath us—was the closest I’d come.  
“You’re a warden, aren’t you, Blondie?” I asked into the stillness, and Anders blinked and nodded slowly.  
“I’m afraid of this line of conversation, but yes.”  
“Stay away from—everyone for a while, okay?” I looked toward him warily. “Maybe even me.”  
“You’re deep into something dark, aren’t you?”  
I exhaled through pursed lips, and nodded. “Yep.”  
Anders stood up straight and tossed his staff almost casually into his left hand, gripped my shoulder with his right.  
“Stay safe, Varric,” he said. “I—wish I could help.”  
I took a step backward and his hand fell off my shoulder. I hesitated, torn between still kicking him down into the water and offering some further conciliation. Instead I just stood there for a second staring at the back of his head, remembering how vivid and alive he’d been during our first forays into Kirkwall’s sundry conflicts. He’d wanted to do good, then. What happened to that man? What happened to the man who’d existed before Anders and Justice had joined and torn each other apart?  
I grimaced and walked back into the jungle, backing away from the mage until the dense foliage obscured him. I worried—as a warden I figured he’d be especially vulnerable, since between Endreth the warden and the Suns’ origins in the wardens, there appeared to be a sort of trend there.  
Hopefully he’d take my warning to heart, even given how evasive circumstances had necessitated I be. And hopefully if he didn’t, I’d really have the heart to put him down. I talk a big game, but hell—have you ever looked into the eyes of a man you’d wanted for years to call friend, and had to make the decision to kill him? I never wanted to be in that situation, but if it happened, I had to be prepared. I steeled myself.  
Adaar looked up when I stepped back into the clearing—every time I saw him and Cole, after dealing with the remnants of my time in Kirkwall, I felt palpable relief. Kirkwall had been—messy. And truly messy situations like that tended to leave a lot of frayed edges, fragments scattered to the winds, bits of nostalgia and regret that you’d encounter like stepping on glass from a broken window in your childhood home. Cole still stood by the same tree, his hand on it. He looked a little disturbed, his eyes wider and wilder than I was accustomed to, but he didn’t say anything and I smiled at him.  
“Let’s go,” I said.  
“Where?” Adaar said, leaning his hands onto his knees and groaning as he stood up.  
“I need a damn drink,” I said.  


***  


We hiked back into the city with the rain mostly abated, although every few moments tongues of purple lightning would illuminate the sky from horizon to horizon. It was constant, the air electric, and I was at that surreal point of exhaustion where I was either about to cry or laugh and I couldn’t decide which would make more sense.  
A guardsman thundered past me and shoved me in the process, throwing me sideways. I rammed my back into one of the pillars lining the perimeter of the Gallows’ square, swore, recovered my balance and blinked. Abruptly it was so, so—  
\--dark. Shit. Shit.  
Adaar bellowed from somewhere beside and behind me and I noticed the winding thread of chanting pulling through my conscious again. It lurked just beneath the level of active thought, in that part of my brain usually responsible for supplying me with off-color comments that I always failed to filter. Only now there were no ribald comments there—just that gut-gripping, blood-chilling low chant. I decided to try a new tactic and ignore it altogether.  
I charged forward exactly one step and the chanting rushed into a crescendo, until it sounded deafening. I swear I expected the Gallows to shake with the force of the sound in my head. I clapped my hands over my ears and screamed, but it didn’t really matter because somewhere in the blackness Adaar was also screaming, and—go figure—a tormented Qunari giving voice to his fear and confusion is louder than any kind of dwarf.  
A hand smacked me straight across the face.  
“She’s dying!” Cole yelled. I blinked at him through the veil of darkness—he looked vague, a glimpse of pallor through impenetrable black. “She’s dying and you’re not doing anything!”  
I opened my mouth but nothing came out—I gaped and flapped my jaws like a suffocating fish and Cole hit me again, the smack resounding through air that had grown utterly silent.  
“You can’t listen to them!” he shouted, his grey eyes frantic. “You have to feel—quiet, like the stone. You have to be your heartbeat, Varric!”  
I had no goddamn clue what that meant, but I had to try something. The chant roaring in the back of my brain absolutely had the power to drive me insane—I could feel it happening, threads of logic snapping like sinew.  
I closed my eyes. My heartbeat beat out a corybantic rhythm that competed with the chant in volume—don’t think that’s what Cole meant. But my last remaining sensible thought understood the gist. An image flooded me—  
\--creeping upstairs into my suite in the Hanged Man after a long night of the usual carousing. Hawke had retreated hours ago, having lost every drinking game and beggaring mercy she knew I’d grant her. I slipped in the door and spent a full minute closing it, so it wouldn’t creak and the latch wouldn’t lock loudly enough to wake her.  
She’d shifted anyway.  
“Varric?”  
“Go back to sleep,” I’d said. But she sat up and I walked to her, and she looked at me blearily before laying back down.  
“Night, Varric,” she’d muttered.  
“Night, Hawke.” And I’d stood there for a long time listening to her breathe, knowing she trusted me completely.  
I made my world the sound of Hawke breathing. I opened my eyes and instead of the impregnable blackness, the world seemed greyscale. But at least I could see. As my senses returned, I noticed the lack of all-consuming chanting—I also noticed that Adaar continued to shout from beside me. He stood a few paces away, clutching at his head, writhing. It looked uncomfortable.  
Shit, had I looked like that? Without the chanting and the whole ‘preternatural, terrifying darkness’ thing, the Inquisitor looked a little foolish.  
“See?” Cole said. “If you listen to something else, they can’t reach you.”  
“So basically we just have to go around slapping all of the Suns until they listen to something else?”  
“No,” he said, addressing me like an idiot. “They have to be willing. Also, you’re a dwarf. You already feel quiet, you just got distracted.”  
“Ah,” I said. “So uh—where is everyone?” A streak of white-grey lightning pealed through the clouds overhead.  
“Killing, cursing the cusp of crepuscular completion—they have to because the darkness is a thing that blurs the edges of their lives. If I am the sun, how can the darkness take me?” Cole blinked, shook his head a little. “I don’t understand. They kill because killing dims the darkness, lures the light. They kill because—because there has to be darkness, to have light.”  
“So where is everyone?”  
“Their magic isn’t real!” Cole yelped, as though somehow offended that I didn’t understand his endless stream of riddles. “It’s just—a mirror you can’t see. A trick. They make you think you’re alone because if you’re alone, the darkness comes quicker. But they’re not good at it, and other people get tricked, too.”  
“So I’m seeing the world in black and white right now because of some amateur trick?”  
“Yes.”  
“But I’m listening to something else.” (Inhale, exhale, deep, warm breaths of a woman who faces too much on a daily basis to not thoroughly enjoy her rest.)  
“It’s—inside you. The voices distract you so you don’t notice the deeper voices, the ones that get into your flesh and your heart and change you.”  
“Got it.” I looked around. Adaar had shut up, had fallen to his knees and rested there peacefully enough, head cradled in his hands.  
“He tried,” Cole said. “He tried to listen to something else, but all he can hear is Dorian’s laugh. It makes him dark.”  
I quickly lamented the loss of my warrior. My gut clenched—I’d been so wrapped up in dealing with this, I’d spared nothing to try and nurture poor Adaar through… this. A man as ostentatious and bold as Dorian would prove difficult to get over, but I hadn’t even tried. And now—  
“So is he going to unleash hell next time we see him?” I thought of Fenris, out there hunting Anders on the coast. I mean, it didn’t strike me as unusual behavior for the elf, but it seemed like he’d have been doing it a long time ago if he’d had the inclination.  
Cole frowned. “Let’s go,” he said. “Please.”  
I nodded, followed Cole a few paces before turning back to Adaar’s crouched form.  
“Adaar,” I said. He didn’t look up. “We’ll be back, Pup, okay? Just uh—hold on.”  
We passed between the pillars and into the shadows. Footsteps—a man spooked from the shadows and darted straight past me, and before I could think or react in a more rational way, I gave chase.  
“She’s dying!” Cole shouted after me. I didn’t care. I kept running, pushing every ounce of endurance and stamina into my pace. The chanting tried to return and I forced even breaths into every part of me—filled myself with stone and steady breathing. This bastard wouldn’t get away.  
According to Cole, their tricks were just that—tricks. If I didn’t believe in the deception, maybe it wouldn’t work. I had my chance to test this theory as the man flung himself around a corner and hauled ass toward Lowtown. Open-mouthed and panting, every breath searing my lungs (dwarves are more endurance runners when they’re runners at all, okay), I threw the last reserves of energy into my stride. I lunged forward. My fingertips brushed his coat and I gathered myself and really leapt, grabbed at any part of him I could find. I ended up with an arm and that proved to be enough.  
We crashed to the ground. I scrambled to establish any kind of a hold, kicking his ankle as hard as I could when he tried to stand up again. From his arm I grabbed his shoulder and slammed him down onto the ground, pouncing atop him with my knees on his chest. I felt him writhing, trying to get his arms free, and before I could react, he’d slapped two fingers to what I now knew would be a scar on his other arm.  
“That’s not real!” I shouted past my labored breathing. I couldn’t think of what else to say. Nothing happened—no dust, no smoke, no ashes or bees or moths or nugs. Just a man pinioned by a dwarf. His expression melted into something I can only describe as ‘oh, well, shit.’  
“Yeah,” I said. “Shit.” I let him up a little and when he went to scramble away I slammed him back down, slapping the heel of my hand against his forehead and shoving his head onto the ground.  
“Where’s Endreth?” I hissed, crouching low over him, staring directly into his eyes. “Where the fuck is he?”  
“I am a fire,” the man said. “I am afire.”  
I leaned forward onto him, pulling a bolt from my back and pressing it down against his throat.  
“Not quite the answer I’m looking for,” I said. “Where is Endreth?”  
The man sputtered, mouth opening as he struggled to breath. I leaned a little more weight onto the bolt and when his eyes took on that particular shade of panic, I pulled back, shaking my head.  
“Shit. You don’t know.”  
“Sacrifice darkness to the sun,” the man gasped. “Ramiroth consumes the shadows and dispels the call.”  
“Yeah, I know, buddy.” I patted his forehead, wondering what to do with him. He’d probably left a corpse back in the Gallows—according to Cole, the Suns dragged their victims into a sort of counterfeit magic, demented their minds, and accidentally drew in a select few nearby people, as well. Probably people who’d already experienced a bit of the cult’s delusions. Which, of course, would be us every time.  
I couldn’t just release the guy. Slowly, slowly, again with that perplexing quality that I didn’t notice until I noticed, the world resumed its usual palate of colors. I stood up and kicked the guy over onto his stomach, grabbed his wrist and pulled him to his feet. He didn’t seem much inclined to run, but I held fast to his arm anyway and dragged him back into the Gallows. Cole stood in the shadows looking terrified, and once again Adaar found himself thronged by very inquisitive guardsmen. I’d exonerate him in a moment—for now I walked to Cole, who stood beside the corpse of another woman.  
“Is it only women?” I asked him, throwing my captive up against the stone wall of the building beside us.  
“No,” Cole said. “It’s everyone.”  
“Four men and four women now, actually,” Aveline said, walking up behind us. I turned around and she sunk her sharp, accusatory green gaze into me as though it were a sword. “And here you are again, Varric.”  
“Here I am again,” I said. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, captain.”  
She eyed me and I couldn’t help but notice something a little off in her stare. A pair of guardsmen approached to collect my captive, and Aveline glanced toward them, breaking our accord.  
“Don’t listen to him, boys,” she said. “You don’t want any part of what he’s saying.”  
“Aveline,” I said. “You okay?”  
She sighed, passed her hand over her face. “Yes. For now.”  
“Fenris has apparently gone rogue. So I thought I’d ask.”  
She lifted an eyebrow and dropped her hand, shook her head. “No, I’m fine. Just—whispers, mostly. Can’t hardly sleep. Tell me you’ve found something, Varric. The city’s half mad with fear about this, and I can’t even release any information, or I risk sending half of them straight into the cult’s ranks.”  
“They’re called the Suns,” I said, waving her along with me. She and I walked toward Adaar, who stood in the middle of a huddle of guards, looking fuddled and maybe a little angry. “They worship an old Tevinter god called Ramiroth, because he represents the sun and the stars.”  
“Any idea why they keep killing my citizens?”  
“Yeah. They started in the wardens, I guess, around the time the wardens became a thing. I don’t know what it was like then, but now they’ve got to send souls into the darkness to avoid going to the darkness themselves. Something like that. Endreth is a warden. I think that’s everything.”  
“Well, it’s certainly enough,” she said. We reached Adaar and she waved her guardsmen aside absent-mindedly, murmuring words of approval to them and telling them to help interrogate the captured man. I kept it to myself that I knew the man had likely already exploded into a cloud of ash—without knowing not to listen to the influences they couldn’t consciously hear, the guards didn’t stand a chance against his artifices.  
Adaar looked at me and he looked hunted. Eyes bloodshot, pupils dilated, mouth open and a rough pant wracking his enormous body.  
“Varric,” he said. “Don’t trust me anymore.”  
I let all the air out of my lungs in a protracted exhale, my hope expiring. I felt everything crumbling around me, and running around catching rubble in my hands and trying to hold it all together felt too exhausting to maintain. I felt myself flagging, and the knowledge that I couldn’t afford to flag, that doing so would consign all of us to insanity and Hawke to likely death—shit.  
Would I end up alone in this? Tension gripped me and I forced what I hoped looked like a nonchalant smile.  
“Now I think we all need a drink,” I said. “Our dear friend Aveline included.”  
“She already listens to something else,” Cole said, tilting his head curiously at Aveline. “She hears her sword when she sharpens it. The way it sings.”  
“I don’t… like you,” Aveline said to him. “But alright, Varric. I’ll let you buy me a drink. Maker knows we’re all due to relax.”  
Spoiler alert: None of us could relax. We all sat at a table in the Hanged Man with drinks in front of us, but I’d yet to even propose a drinking game. I felt a little distracted. I could sense the situation becoming more dire—eight people killed in Kirkwall so far, and if the Suns’ influence spread, there would be more deaths in more cities. And still no sign of Hawke, no tell of her besides from Huna.  
Goddamn Huna. Somehow the low, constant level of my panic and the thrill of investigation had distracted me from this before, but how seriously weird did you have to be to kindle a relationship with an ages-old mountain witch? Huna’d mentioned it so offhand. ‘I can’t tell you where Endreth is because he’s Salome’s dad’ didn’t sound like much of an excuse once you considered Endreth’s cult had murdered eight people in Kirkwall, but I guess your morals shifted once you’re chased out of a city and spend the ages living alone in the mountains.  
I needed to know the rest of that story, if only to shamelessly rip it off and put it in a novel. Let’s face it, probably a romance—tortured warden goes into the mountains to end his life, meets instead an enigmatic witch woman who bears him a daughter and keeps his secrets. But seriously, what had been Huna’s involvement in the Suns’ first emergence in Kirkwall? It had to be connected to why Endreth had reignited the cult now.  
It drove me crazy to sense all of these connections and not be able to actually connect any of them. Like doing a puzzle where you can sense what image you’re supposed to be making, but none of the pieces fit.  
The door to the Hanged Man banged open and in strode Salome, soaking wet and looking a fine mixture of furious and so, so confused. She swept her gaze around the tavern and when it landed on me it took everything I had not to shrink away. She marched toward us, mouth a tight, ferocious line. Once she reached the table, she slammed her palm down onto the wood, making the drinks (and me) jump.  
“Civilization is stupid!” she yelled, and the continual chatter of the Hanged Man stilled for a second.  
“Hey, Zap,” I said, gesturing for her to lower her voice. “I know you’re used to shouting whenever you want, but people in here like their civilization.”  
I could almost feel the critical glare Aveline directed into the back of my head. Cole stared at Salome without any expression, but I could tell he found her fascinating. Adaar remained as taciturn as he’d been the entire evening—he eyed the girl but without any real conviction.  
I scooted in on the bench, and Salome set herself down beside me, setting her staff against the wall. Years ago, a mage outside the circle would have been cause for an outright riot—she’d have been seized and made tranquil, probably, at least in Kirkwall. Now, just like Adaar, she raised a few eyebrows, but nothing significant. Nothing that made me nervous. Things had changed—because we’d changed them. I couldn’t decide how I felt about that—mostly I think I just felt weird, a little anxious, because my train of thought on being perceived a hero had been convoluted and dark.  
Leliana had disbanded the Circle. And while I am a firm believer in letting people do whatever they want, provided they have the mental capacity for it and lack violent inclinations, I still couldn’t decide how I felt on that. I had to wonder what Thedas would have been—how it would have developed—if the Exalted March against Tevinter had never occurred, if mages had never breached the Fade. If they’d been understood, guided but not trapped. I wondered if I’d have liked Anders, in that universe. Maybe Dorian wouldn’t have needed to return to Tevinter to set things right there—maybe the memory of his laughter wouldn’t cause my friend such pain.  
I found myself grieving for the world I’d lived in before all of this. I immediately felt guilty—it’d been months of toil and heartbreak to get to this point. I shouldn’t have regretted it, and I guess I didn’t, not really—but I looked back and everything seemed simpler, the despair more centralized.  
Salome grabbed my ale—the best the Hanged Man had—and drained it in a few thirsty gulps. I almost protested, but she looked like she’d been through about the same as I’d been through. Her curly black hair lay flat and sodden, dirt smeared across her freckled cheeks, one of her sleeves a little ripped with a flash of scarlet beneath it.  
“You meet with some trouble?” I asked her, and she set my mug back down delicately on the table.  
“Bandits,” she said.  
Aveline leaned forward onto the table to see around me. “Where?”  
“Down the coast. Bit outside of town. Big, angry, dirty sort of folk.”  
“I think you just described most of Kirkwall,” Aveline said, pulling back to lean her back against the wall. “But I’ll increase patrols that direction.”  
Salome nodded but I don’t think she quite understood what Aveline spoke of.  
“Mother wouldn’t tell me where my father is,” she said to me. I fixed her with a deadened stare and she offered me a sprightly grin. “But I found a note from him.”  
“Zap,” I said, with a hearty note of approval. “You don’t seem like the type to go rifling through your mother’s possessions. Partly because your mother is terrifying.”  
Her grin flashed wider before dropping entirely from her face. She lay a hand on my shoulder and stared deep into my eyes.  
“Varric, I would do anything for you. Don’t you know that?” She laughed and pulled back, settling into her seat. “Endreth is going to visit a warden contact of his outside of Tantervale.”  
My heart raced. I expected to meet Adaar’s eyes and share a moment of triumph with the Inquisitor, but he remained out of commission, hands on the table, utterly downtrodden.  
“So what’s your grand scheme, Varric?” Aveline asked. I shifted to look at her. “It’d better be good, because next time I find you in the vicinity of a victim, I’m arresting you.” She smiled a grim little smile that suggested less humor than her tone implied.  
“Guess we’re on our way to Tantervale,” I said.  
“Well,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.” She leaned back, blinked a little past the fog of alcohol, and got to her feet. She stood there for a moment and I looked up at her, expecting some kind of a farewell.  
“Don’t come back here, Varric,” she said. “After tomorrow. Just—go and find Hawke and kill this cult, whatever it is. But don’t come back until I’m… better.”  
She struggled with something. I could tell. Her voice sounded dark and menacing, unlike her usual sardonic tone.  
“Okay, captain,” I said. No time to quibble or try to make light of the situation. Her eyes locked with mine and I could see she wouldn’t appreciate any jocose remarks.  
“I don’t know why,” she said, shaking her head, touching the heel of her hand to her forehead. “I don’t know why, but I think you’re involved in this. And I really want to arrest you. But instead I’m going to go back to the barracks and drink some more in my office, and fall asleep at my desk, and when I wake up you’ll be gone. Right?”  
“Right,” I said. “Absolutely. Right.”  
Aveline nodded, then turned and walked out the door. I stared after her for a few moments, thinking.  
“She doesn’t feel quiet anymore,” Cole said. “She tried so hard, for so long, but not even the memory of her father could make her strong this time. She failed. She knows it.”  
“She didn’t fail,” I said, reaching automatically for my drink and remembering that Salome had requisitioned it. “We’re going to fix her. We’re going to fix all of this.”  
“Oh, there’s one other thing,” Salome said. “Endreth is going to a party at a duke’s house. That’s where we have to find him.”  
I looked around at all of us—the most promising prospect would be Cole, who at least could probably make himself intangible and avoid how terribly gauche it would be to march uninvited into a duke’s party dressed in filthy, bloody clothes.  
I mean, at least we all had changes of clothing. But that didn’t change the fact that I hadn’t exactly packed party clothes for what had ostensibly been a trip to Kirkwall to help stack some bricks together and sweep up rubble, maybe pick up some stray body parts.  
“Well,” I said. “Crashing a party looking like I just rolled out of a dragon’s asshole isn’t the least thought out thing I’ve done.”  
“I think we all need to hear the story of the least thought out thing, now,” Salome said.  
“I’ll write a book about it for you,” I said. “That’s a story that needs space.”  
She laughed, but I could sense her spirits dimming. “So you sleep… inside?”  
“Yeah. Some of us go so far as to sleep on beds instead of rocks. Take a second to acclimate to that idea.”  
A troubled look passed across her face. “I’ve never slept inside before.”  
I looked at her, narrowing my eyes and smiling a little smugly. “Behold the wonders I will lead you to. So you’re traveling with us, I take it?”  
She nodded. I couldn’t help but notice how utterly unprepared she’d come—just the clothes on her back and her staff. I guess she assumed the pre-established pack of travelers she’d integrated herself into would be funded enough to afford feeding her, too. Never a good assumption to make. Good way to starve, though, in some parts of Thedas.  
Fortunately, the steadfast leader of the gang she’d joined on with had proved himself notoriously unwilling to let his companions perish of hunger. And by ‘him’ I mean ‘me,’ because sure as hell purchasing food for all of us fell on me the next morning. Salome appeared beside me in Lowtown’s bustling market, disheveled and displeased, whipping around in tiny circles whenever another person brushed past her.  
“I can’t believe there’s going to be a party in Tantervale,” I said, half to her and half to myself as I wrapped everything into our packs and foisted them off onto Adaar, who’d been following me mutely all morning. “Honestly, earth tones will probably be a fine palette for that soiree. In fact, we should all dress a little more drably. Do you know why I really hate Endreth?” I asked, not really talking to anyone anymore, focused now on navigating my way out of the market and back to the Gallows, from where we would disembark back onto the coast in the opposite direction of our previous forays.  
“Why?” Cole asked, staring wide-eyed around, hand on the brim of his hat as the wind increased.  
“Because he chose to attend a party in Tantervale, which means that I have to attend a party in Tantervale. Now if he’d chosen a party in Wycome, that I could get behind. Share some Antivan vintages with the guy, explain my side of things. Hell, we could go find Hawke together. No problem. But Tantervale? Tantervale?”  
The wind continued to rise, and I didn’t mind at all—a bundle of giddy nerves had lodged somewhere between my stomach and my throat, and I pushed us forward determinedly. My plan, feverishly concocted in the depths of my sleepless night listening to Adaar snore and half-heartedly responding to Salome as she sat by the window and muttered intermittent oaths toward the indoors at me, stood as follows: make it through the Planasene Forest and march straight through to Tantervale. Three days. Just in time for the soiree. It’d would’ve been simpler with horses, of course, but in spite of what Salome seemed to believe, I wasn’t made of gold. The myth of dwarves being made of metals and stone has long ago been disproven, although a lot of the dwarves I’ve met do a pretty good job of debunking that disproving.  
So we forged our way through the forest, following sort of a path and sort of a route I made up as I went along. Adaar strode ahead of me again, unspeaking, tearing branches out of the way—not just holding them aside for us, mind you, but tearing them out of the way. I want to be extremely clear about that. He’d been silent and brooding the entire time since the murder the night before—I’m not going to lie and say that I hadn’t begun to suspect his motives. He’d looked straight at me and told me not to trust him and that had been the last thing he’d said to me.  
One day my faith in people is going to turn around and bite me straight in the ass. Or, more realistically, it’s probably going to turn around and stab me in the goddamn throat. I tried to tell myself that Adaar remained useful—he retained his stature even if he lost his mind, after all. That boded just as terribly for us as it did for any potential enemies we encountered, but I ignored that.  
The sun began to sink and the forest began to thin, the path gaining altitude as the forest withered and climbed into the Vimmarks. We climbed to the crest of a ridge and before us the Marches spread out before us, the inland cities laying like distant scourges upon the land. Wildervale would be the closest, with the barest glimmer of the Minanter River just over the horizon. I opened my mouth to say something, when something exploded behind us. Just a single resounding crash-boom that rolled through the forest behind and below us. Adaar’s great horned head whipped up and he stood on tense alert far after I’d given up and figured if whatever had made the sound wanted to kill us, at least we’d probably see it coming.  
We set up camp. Salome, who’d been mostly grim and silent during our trek, leaning on her staff more and more the further we’d gone, proved a competent ally in this area. She kindled a fire with a strike of her staff.  
“Fire is easy,” she said. “Just—boom. It rolls out of you like nothing.” She flopped down in front of the fire, resting her forehead in her hands. “Lightning is hard, if you don’t want to kill everything around you. You want to kill everything, it’s easy. You want to channel it and control it—takes everything out of you.”  
“Where did you learn it?” Cole asked, sitting down beside me and looking curiously at Salome across the fire. “You make the air listen to you. It—likes you.”  
“Yeah, I’ve got questions about that, too,” I said, patting the kid’s knee affectionately. “Shouldn’t you be a hedge mage? Your magic seems awfully focused for someone who, until last night, had never slept indoors.”  
Salome narrowed her eyes and I could tell her first reaction wanted to be spite. But she shrugged, lifting a hand and letting a tiny serpentine of lightning curl around her fingers.  
“My mother taught me,” she said. “But she’s not a mage.”  
“What is she, then?” I asked, leaning forward toward her.  
Salome stared into the fire and shrugged again. “No idea. I don’t really want to talk about my mom.”  
If ever I could sympathize with a statement, it would be that one. Salome lay down and fell asleep quickly, probably exhausted after hardly sleeping at all last night. I, on the other hand, had the opposite problem—I sat there and Cole lay down and put his head in my lap and I continued to sit there, hand on the kid’s side as his breathing deepened and lengthened and he fell asleep, too.  
Adaar, who’d been standing behind me on constant alert, sat down heavily on my other side. He reached a hand out and allowed the dying fire to lick at his fingers.  
“Varric,” he said roughly. “It’s not right anymore. It’s in my brain. It wants me to—it wants me to not be able to live without him.”  
“What’s it like?” I asked. I wanted to know—kind of needed to know.  
He groaned low in his throat, leaned forward and pressed his knuckles into his temples.  
“It’s like every doubt I’ve ever had just got really drunk, and they’re all throwing a huge party with all my magnified insecurities,” he said. “It’s like having holes bored into your brain and all of the self-loathing that keeps to the corners usually just… jumps on in. I can’t—think. I can hardly talk.”  
I grimaced. I wanted to say—anything, but nothing came out. At the very least, I found myself glad that I’d not completely lost my friend. Fenris had vanished to hunt down Anders, Aveline had driven me out of Kirkwall, and apparently the insanity just wanted Adaar to hate himself.  
“I’m sorry,” I said after a while. For lack of anything else to do with my hands, I propped Bianca against my legs and started the meticulous process of oiling and cleaning her. It helped to keep my hands busy and to give my attention somewhere else to focus that wasn’t the taut and tortured look on Adaar’s face.  
“Why?” he asked. Apparently I started a trend, because he drew his sword and I handed him a rag and soon we were both polishing our weapons. That sounds like a euphemism but all it amounted to, really, involved two men talking but not talking, engaged in menial tasks to avoid engaging on the level they wanted to.  
“I mean—I dragged you along with me because I thought you needed a distraction, right? I wanted to talk to you. Walk you through… you know.”  
“Dorian leaving?” His voice broke.  
“Yeah. And instead I didn’t. I made every goddamn thing about me. It’s not—usually how I operate. So I’m sorry.”  
“Varric,” he said. “You didn’t make this about you at all. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you make a single thing about yourself. We’re looking for your friend.”  
“And in the process, we’re all going insane in the worst ways possible,” I said. “I’ve just got to get us out of this, okay? And then I swear I’m buying you as many drinks as it takes for you to sleep with someone else.”  
He shook his great horned head, rested his sword across his knees.  
“The morning he left, he didn’t even say goodbye. He spent the entire day before out with Ellana and when he got back I was asleep, and when I woke up, he was gone.”  
It didn’t surprise me. I love Dorian—loved making wagers with him while we traipsed through dangers untold, loved having a companion who understood my need to make light of every situation—but I don’t get the impression that he’s very graceful with goodbyes.  
“Can I tell you something?” I asked, finally turning to address the Qunari directly. He nodded. “I don’t think Dorian wanted to leave. I think if he said goodbye, it meant to him that he was leaving for longer than he wanted.”  
Adaar made a sound I think he intended to be a laugh, but which sounded more like a sob.  
“That’s shitty.”  
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it really is.” A comfortable pause passed between us. “So do you feel better now?”  
Any trace of smile lapsed from his face. “Not at all.”  
“On a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to decide you want to divorce my head from my body?”  
“Maybe a seven,” he said. I lifted an eyebrow and looked at him a little more intently. But when he looked back at me, a pained smile curved across his lips.  
“You asshole,” I said.  
“I don’t know how far this will go,” he said. “Don’t trust me. I feel—different. I’m not sure if ‘different’ will turn into ‘murderous.’”  
I nodded. I wanted to trust him, but if he blatantly told me not to, I wouldn’t fall asleep before him. In fact, as it turned out, I wouldn’t fall asleep at all. I sat there with Cole breathing softly in my lap, my eyelids so heavy I thought I would die, staring at Adaar as he lay on the rock and went to sleep.  
Finally, sometime after the moon had hiked up to its apex, I decided I couldn’t spend two entire nights awake. I shook Cole and he yawned as he sat up, looked at me inquiringly.  
“Watch Adaar,” I said. “Don’t fall asleep, okay, kid?” I’d known Cole long enough to be aware that he rarely disobeyed a direct order from me—he followed them religiously. Sure enough, he nodded vigorously, rubbed the sleep from his eyes and fixed his unwavering stare on the sleeping hulk of the Qunari.  
I lay down, trying at first to use my coat as a pillow, before the temperature dipped into ‘way too cold for this shit’ and I donned the garment again, choosing the less masculine option of swapping positions with Cole. I lay my head in his lap and felt him tense, then realize my intention and relax completely.  


***  


Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with the sun just hefting up and over the horizon. I dragged myself out of Cole’s lap and caught Salome’s bemused expression. I scowled at nobody in particular, working the kinks out of my neck and shoulders. Kid had a lot of strong points, but ease of napping couldn’t be counted among them.  
“So is this how the mighty Inquisition camps? You all just cuddle?” she sneered.  
“Hey, I’m accustomed to a certain level of comfort in my life,” I said. “As it happens, Cole does not meet my standards for comfort. Sorry, kid.”  
“It’s okay,” he said.  
We continued on, descending through the Vimmarks. Being out of Kirkwall seemed to have improved Cole’s mental state, at least, although it did little for Adaar, who continued to trudge along silently. As we emerged from the mountains into the relatively flat inland Free Marches, the topography itself seemed bored—foliage grew sparse, mostly tall grasses and the occasional slender tree with small, roundish leaves. Reasonably green, just not the most interesting place I’ve traveled through. That’s not really fair, though, given the fact that I’ve now been both to the Western Approach and the Emerald Graves, such diametric opposites that everything in between seemed a little drab now.  
Day two of traveling on almost no sleep wore on me. I fell behind, while Salome maintained our brisk pace at the front of our straggling group. Eventually she stopped, stabbing her staff into the path and passing her dismissive blue eyes across me.  
“You look like shit,” she said.  
“Thank you, darling,” I said, panting open-mouthed, hair in my face, sweat soaking through my clothes in great dark patches.  
“You want to stop?” She crossed her arms, leaning her weight onto her staff.  
“No,” I said. Down the path, I knew we’d pass through the outskirts of Wildervale, but I intended to bypass the city and get as close to Tantervale as we could by tonight. An idiotic plan, and I knew it, but the sooner we could get to Endreth—shit, I could almost see Hawke in the distance. The thought of stopping and sleeping made me feel anxious.  
But beside me, Adaar wavered on his feet, his posture slumped and defeated. He met my eyes begrudgingly, any trace of good will gone. Cole stood down the path a little ways ahead, but he also looked bedraggled. I think Salome looked the best, but I think the prospect of adventure provided her with supernatural energy at this point.  
“Fine,” I said, sighing, scratching at the back of my head. I’d take the fall for them and find us a real place to sleep for the night—maybe somewhere where I didn’t have to share a bed with Adaar. Scratch that—I would sleep literally anywhere as long as I didn’t have to share a bed with Adaar, ever again. I’m half convinced Dorian snuck out of the Inquisitor’s room every night for the entirety of their relationship, to seek some solace and quiet in his own quarters.  
I walked back to the head of our group and continued down the path. I thought I knew of a tavern down the road a little, someplace I’d stopped before while traveling through the Marches.  
“You’re stubborn,” Salome remarked, falling into place beside me. “I’ve never met a dwarf before, but I’d heard they were… stubborn.”  
I laughed. “Well, I think that’s more my personality than my race. If a stone-dweller even heard you call me a dwarf, they’d probably laugh in your face.”  
“Why?” I could see she nurtured an honest curiosity—I felt a pang of sympathy for the poor sheltered girl. She’d never seen a dwarf, hadn’t even known what race Adaar belonged to. If she stuck with me, she’d see more than she felt comfortable with in pretty short order, I felt confident.  
“Well,” I said, “I’m a surfacer. Born above ground. To a disgraced family. Fortunately by the time I was born, most of the drama had passed, but I’m still not your typical dwarf.”  
“Oh,” she said.  
“Hey,” I said to her as the tavern appeared past a curve in the road. “Keep the whole magic thing kind of quiet in here, okay?”  
She quirked an eyebrow, her active, intrigued expression quieting into something more hostile. “Why?”  
“People in the Marches aren’t the most open-minded,” I said. “Especially this close to Tantervale. Just keep it low-key, okay?”  
She eyed me, frowning.  
“For me?” I drew up and touched her arm. Salome startled, jerked to a halt and fixed me with a stare that started out withering and faded into something—confused.  
She laughed, a smile striking across her face. “Okay, Varric. For you, I promise not to electrocute anyone unless they try to electrocute me, first.”  
“That’s a very specific criterion,” I said, and we walked into the tavern. If it appeared low and dark from the outside, it proved somehow even lower and darker on the inside. Wind creaked through the visible gaps between some of the wooden boards in the walls. I shivered, found to my relief that the burble of conversation didn’t pause when we entered. Not even when Adaar squeezed himself through the door. Maybe I’d been wrong—maybe folk in Wildervale saw shit like this day and night.  
I ordered drinks and food from the barkeep, trying to be as charismatic as possible given my present state of fatigue. And then I sat down and turned my ear strategically to the tables behind and around us.  
“—mage on the road who looked like he’d come straight from the jaws of death.”  
“Did you stop?”  
“No. Hell no. I’m all for free mages but I don’t trust them when I see them.”  
“I wonder if he made it.”  
“I dunno. Guy looked pretty torn up.”  
I drained half of the bitter swill I’d ended up with, made a sour face and once again bemoaned the location of this party to which we were headed.  
“Who the hell travels with a Qunari? After Kirkwall…”  
“I think if he’s traveling with non-Qunari, he’s probably Tal-Vashoth.”  
“Smart-ass.”  
I smiled. Across from me, Adaar’s eyes narrowed, and I thought he must’ve heard that particular conversation as well. As far as I could tell, no one in the tavern paid us any particular attention, though.  
“Quiet, Miller. Quiet, now.”  
“Maker, I can’t stop it, I can’t stop hearing it.  
“I know.”  
The man who’d spoken that last had a deep, resonant, powerful voice—it sounded kind. His cadence first drew my attention, and then the grim import of their conversation. I drained the rest of my drink, leaning back in my chair to both appear more relaxed and to get myself that crucial couple of inches closer to their table.  
“Shit, I’m not ready to die, Ender,” Miller said. “Is that what this is? The fucking darkspawn blood deciding when I should die?”  
“Yes,” Ender said. “But—but—“ His voice broke. I couldn’t see the guy, but his voice filled with tension, as though he were wrestling something corporeal. I fixed a smile to my face and appeared to be engaged in the argument Salome and Cole currently entertained, in which Salome resorted to logic and reason to explain what the Fade was, and Cole waxed more and more metaphorical. Salome sighed hard, before launching into her fourth explanation, while Cole sat very still and stared at her with wide, silver eyes.  
“What is it?” Miller asked. “If you know something, Ender, you’ve—you’ve got to tell me. Please.”  
“You don’t want this,” Ender said.  
“I don’t want what?”  
“You don’t want this curse!” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ender raise a hand as though to smack it down onto the table, but he stayed the motion halfway down. He froze like that for a moment before laying his hand on the table. “If I tell you anything, the call will stop.”  
“Tell me!”  
“No! Listen to me. You will also be—burdened.” I tilted my head a little to the side and saw Ender lean forward. Very, very briefly, he met my eyes. Shit.  
“We have to go,” Ender said, lowering his voice drastically so that I could barely hear him. Shit shit shit. I had this nagging suspicion that Ender could reasonably be a nickname for Endreth. I heard them both stand up, chairs scraping, and they left.  
I leaned forward in my chair and apparently I’d given some indication of my utter horror, because Salome and Cole had stopped bickering and both stared at me.  
“He doesn’t want to do it,” Cole said. “But it’s like Calypso said, spiders in your brain. The thoughts aren’t you but you think they are, and you can’t decide which are yours and which aren’t, so sometimes you listen to the wrong ones. And when you listen to the wrong ones, they get stronger.”  
I slapped both palms against the table and before I knew what I planned to do, I lunged out of my chair and pushed through the door into the outside. The sun had almost set and the sky overhead looked like stained glass, clouds painted pink and orange, the sky pale blue. Ender and Miller had retrieved horses from the stable and I walked toward them as Ender—a silver-haired man with broad shoulders and a strong, hardened expression—made to put his foot in the stirrup and mount.  
“Endreth,” I said. I felt numb. The thought this bastard might know something about Hawke and he was just going to ride away from me kept replaying through my brain, and even though Cole had told me that being a dwarf made me, uh, quieter than most, I still wondered whether this foolhardy confrontation had something to with my exposure to the cult. Because honestly, I couldn’t decide whether or not the impulse to charge out here had been mine, or that of the—the spiders in my brain.  
Endreth stood there, poised, one foot in the stirrup, hands on his horse’s saddle.  
“Yes?” he asked.  
If the compulsion had been the doing of the spiders in my brain, they chose that moment to shut up. I stared at him and Miller, shorter and stockier than his companion, grunted and heaved himself into his saddle.  
“Don’t do it,” I said.  
He narrowed his eyes at me, and pulled himself the rest of the way into his saddle. I realized that all this time I had been so intent on just finding this guy, I’d finally located him and I had no idea what I needed to say. Not knowing what to say wasn’t usually a problem I had.  
“Look,” I said, raising my hands beseechingly. I walked toward him, footsteps crunching in the loose rock outside the tavern. “You don’t know me, but I need to talk to you.”  
He kept staring. I didn’t think he’d blinked in a matter of minutes. Adaar pushed through the door of the tavern and strode toward us, hand on the hilt of his sword, and again I found myself considering giving the Qunari some tiny signal, sending him roaring down upon Endreth. But the warden’s heels hovered at his horse’s sides, and I didn’t think even a Qunari warrior could outrun a horse.  
The Inquisitor stopped just beside and behind me, and I felt him overshadowing me. Endreth’s eyes drifted upward, but he looked unimpressed. “What is it?” he asked.  
“My friend Hawke—she was investigating some murders in Kirkwall.” I gave him a significant look. I mean, this guy had orchestrated the cult’s resurgence in Kirkwall, I’m sure he knew what I spoke of without me explicitly name-dropping the Suns. “The thing is, she disappeared after learning your name.”  
Miller looked so perplexed I thought he’d raise an objection, but Endreth spoke before he could.  
“Peculiar,” he said, his voice flat and calm. “I’m sorry, but I’ve not heard that name.”  
Salome and Cole had both joined us, and Miller grew visibly agitated, kicking his horse forward and trotting in a loose circle.  
“Ender,” he said. “Let’s go.”  
“She’s important to me,” I said, taking another step forward. “Come on, Endreth. One man to another. If you’d seen her, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”  
“I don’t know you, dwarf,” he said. He kicked his horse and the two of them took off down the path, leaving a billowing cloud of dust in their wake.  
I stared after them, clenching and unclenching my fists. At least I hadn’t revealed that we knew their destination. Even so, frustration—at Endreth, but mostly at my own stupid self—boiled inside me.  
“Zap, meet your father,” I said as Salome came alongside me.  
“I feel underwhelmed,” she said.  
I whirled around, fists clenched, unable to stare at our quarry galloping away from us any longer.  
“He’s lying,” I said. “I know that miserable piece of shit is lying. He met Hawke. I know it.”  
I narrowed my eyes and struck out toward the stable, intent on—what? Stealing a horse? Why not just add to my list of crimes committed while under the influence of Hawke?  
Salome grabbed my shoulder and I stopped, bowing my head.  
“Think about it, Varric,” she said, her voice sharp. “The party’s tomorrow. Even if we leave tonight, all we’ll do is get to Tantervale before the party’s started.”  
“He was lying,” Cole said. “Swords singing, he saw the steel in her stare—she was a good fight. He wanted to tell you.”  
My blood went cold. One more time clenching and unclenching my fists.  
“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow.”  
“Tomorrow,” Salome said when I turned back to face her. She looked troubled, somehow, but I lacked the emotional capacity to ask her about it. I’d feel terrible about it tomorrow, but it felt worth the delay.  
“If he killed her,” I said, clapping both hands onto the girl’s shoulders. “I’m going to put a bolt through your father’s throat, and then piss on his corpse.”  
“I know,” she said.  


***  


The environment only grew less exciting as we neared Tantervale. The place had a reputation for being austere, but I personally found it boring. My focus had narrowed since last night, though—for the third night in a row I’d found it difficult to sleep. We weren’t headed into Tantervale, exactly, a goddamn relief on my account. By the time the city even appeared on the horizon, the sun had begun to set—according to Salome’s very precise memory of Endreth’s letter, the party began ‘uh, I think sometime around sunset.’ I hurried everyone up, palms already sweating through my gloves. I’d had all night to think through what I wanted to say to Endreth—what I needed to ask him, what information I specifically required from him—and I rehearsed it under my breath as we neared the city.  
We divagated from the path at the city walls. Someone must have forgotten to paint them, because they were the same damn grey color of the rest of the city. Have I mentioned how boring Tantervale is? I’d probably be arrested upon entrance, just for being a beardless dwarf. I’m positive they’d count that as malicious aberrance or something. Adaar would probably be thrown in prison for being scary. They live differently in Tantervale.  
We’d asked for directions to the estate in question a ways back down the road. I didn’t know the place’s story, or why some random politico had decided to build a palatial estate outside of Tantervale of all paces. But I had to admit the place looked impressive. Iron gates rose a dwarf and a half above me, an elaborate, landscaped path striking a clear line toward the mansion itself. The building possessed the unmistakable grey paint job of its neighboring city—I’m guessing they have some kind of regulation regarding gaudily painted buildings—but most of it looked to be windows, anyway. A pond to the left of the mansion threw starlight back at the heavens.  
Resplendent in our filthy travel gear, we walked down the path and passed through the assembled guests. Few of them noticed us—It looked to be a somber affair, everyone dressed modestly, none of the garish colors and vibrant displays of wealth you’d see at a party in Orlais. No sign of Endreth—we paused by a copse of trees to regroup after our first pass.  
“We need to split up,” I said. “This guy sees any of us, he’s running.”  
“And by ‘us,’ you mean ‘if he sees the giant horned monster,’” Salome said.  
“Yes,” I said. “So Adaar, you go with Cole. If you see him, find me. Let’s catch this asshole.”  
Salome and I walked through the massive double doors and entered a vast, candlelit hall. And when I say ‘candlelit’ I mean that niches along both walls held candle after flickering candle—it smelled like wax and candle smoke. The surreal atmosphere created by the flickering orange light did nothing to alleviate the tension in my bones—it took all of my restraint to not sidle down the hall with Bianca at the ready.  
“So are you going to dance with me?” Salome asked with a wolfish grin.  
“Hate to let you down, Zap, but I don’t think there’s dancing at Tantervale parties.”  
We reached the end of the hallway and I opened the wooden door, leaning into it and opening it in gradations. The room behind the door stretched out in a long rectangle, still with the hundreds of candles set into the walls. The floor, opulent marble, gleamed with the candlelight, and pairs of dancers whirled up and down the hall. A few musicians stood off to the side against a wall, striking up sprightly tune after sprightly tune.  
“Guess I was wrong,” I said. Granted, it didn’t resemble an Orlesian party, mostly because the couples weren’t dancing as though they were also actively tearing down dynasties and simultaneously plotting six assassinations.  
Salome grabbed my hand almost aggressively and I balked, setting my heels against the marble and shaking my head.  
“I don’t dance,” I said.  
“I sense that you’re lying,” she said.  
“Yeah. I am. But I also need to find your dad before my goddamn head explodes.”  
Still holding my hand, Salome stepped close to me, leaning down to whisper into my ear. “And what looks more natural in a room full of people dancing? Walking around the perimeter looking, or dancing in circles while keeping your eyes on the people around you?”  
I chuckled. “I had my doubts about you, Zap. But you’re a natural at being skeevy.”  
I took her other hand and off we went. I’ve danced before, of course, but I’m sort of a lazy, half-hearted dancer at best. It suited us perfectly, because it became clear that, in spite of her eagerness, Salome had never set foot on any kind of a dance floor. My desire to blend in backfired—I sensed the other couples looking at us sideways as we passed them. I guess we still stood out, Salome in pants and a dusty blue tunic, me in my traditional brown… everything, topped off with Bianca on my back. Maybe Tantervale party-goers didn’t dress in the tawdry styles of Orlais, but they still weren’t packing crossbows to attend galas.  
Salome stepped on me constantly, and we ambled around the other couples, eying each of them in turn. No Endreth. The song approached its end and I spun Salome, quickly regretted it, then lost my train of thought when I spotted Endreth with Miller in the far corner, near where the hall spilled back out into the gardens. Deep in conversation, they didn’t notice me—probably a good thing, considering the fact that I hadn’t seen any other dwarves in attendance and me and Salome accordingly made the most noteworthy couple on the floor. And if he had run, I would I’d chase him, and nobody wants to be the center of attention by chasing a venerated warden out of a party.  
Salome stumbled, almost fell, grabbed onto me instead. I caught her and gripped her shoulders, forcing her in front of me before Endreth could catch sight of me. I figured he’d recognize the back of Salome’s head less than he’d recognize a full frontal view of the strange dwarf who’d accosted him last night. Another song began and I swore under my breath.  
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I hissed to Salome. Other dancers bumped into us as the music swelled, but I couldn’t remain concealed while pushed and shoving my way out of the throng of people. So I grabbed Salome’s hands again and we played along, working our way to the outskirts of the assembled couples. At last we emerged, leaving no impression on the people we’d left behind—I verified several times to be certain nobody had eyes on us as we walked away.  
Salome kept herself between me and Endreth, and we crouched and jogged toward the closest door. There were two in the hall—one at the far wall near Endreth and Miller, and one on the wall adjacent to them. We pushed out that door into the gardens.  
I shoved my back against the wall and put Salome there as well, shoving her backwards with an arm across her stomach. Open-mouthed, she breathed silently, scanning our surroundings. I focused my attention on the dull voices I could hear through a window—  
“It’s about time, isn’t it, Ender?”  
“I don’t know—“  
“Shit, don’t falter now. You’re saving us. Whatever you have, it’s—saving us.”  
“You’re right,” Endreth said. “I know you’re right. Don’t I?”  
Even listening to him from the other side of a wall, with the band playing in the background, I could hear the anguish in his voice. It must have been a strong voice, at some point—I could still discern that note of iron, that distinguishing trait of a man who’d known what to do in any situation.  
It made me hurt. I clenched my teeth as the voices moved out of range. Every facet of this situation pained me. All Endreth had told Miller would suggest that he possessed some miraculous cure to the infamous call—when in fact, Endreth’s only solution involved a precipitous descent into insanity. Endreth had experienced it. I’d watched one friend travel a similar path, and stood poised to lose a couple of others if I didn’t accost this guy fast.  
I crept along the wall with Salome close behind me. We reached the corner and descried Endreth and Miller striding off into the gardens, until they vanished into a stand of trees a few feet off across the grass. I waited a moment and then ducked out of cover, immediately adopting a more relaxed, casual stance as I followed them across the gardens. Usually if you look like you know what you’re doing, you can access a surprising array of private locations in a person’s house—I suppose this proved little different. Walk with your shoulders squared and you can march right off the path in a nobleman’s garden. Trample roses to your heart’s delight.  
“What’s the plan?” Salome hissed, ducking to speak directly into my ear. I waved her off, pushing through obstructing branches, until a low intonation from further through the trees caused me to stop abruptly. Salome grabbed my arm to steady herself as she nearly plowed into me—we stood there, my jaw clenched, every part of me tense. Through the trees I could dimply perceive Endreth and Miller, but a third had joined them, a smaller woman in robes with a staff in her hand. A mage.  
“Thank you for coming, Ender,” she said. “I knew I could trust Miller to bring you here.”  
“Don’t thank me,” Endreth said. He sounded desperate.  
“I can’t explain it,” the woman said. “It started in my bones. Is that strange? My teeth itched. The nightmares are—normal, you know, but they became horrific. And they always involved me dying. Being… ripped apart.” A long pause. “Always darkspawn. They get their teeth in you, you know, and you’re gone.”  
“Calypso said the same thing,” Endreth said. I squinted and watched him put his hands to eyes, pressing his thumbs into his temples. “She always complained about itching.”  
Calypso. That name again. I filed the name away for future reference.  
“Maker’s breath, Ender, you know how it is. I don’t want to explain it anymore. I want it gone.”  
“You’ve felt it before,” Miller said. “I got your letters. And then nothing? How the fuck did you accomplish that?”  
I watched Endreth scrub at his eyes for a moment longer. He thrust his hands to his sides.  
“I can’t… I can’t.” He shook his head. Salome’s grip tightened on my arm. “We found something.” His voice broke. I could hear him breaking. Shit.  
“What?”  
“The first wardens,” Endreth said. “They found a way.”  
“And you know how?” the mage said, shoving Endreth in a gesture I couldn’t interpret as jubilant or angry. Maybe both. She advanced on him and Endreth relented a step. “Tell me, what were you going to do with this knowledge? Keep it to your goddamn self?”  
“No,” Endreth said. “No. Calypso went to Weisshaupt. She left months ago.”  
Silence. Miller and the woman shared a long look.  
“You don’t understand!” Endreth yelped, staggering backward. “You don’t understand, it makes you insane! There’s something about it, it takes the itch away but puts something else inside you. You don’t want this, you don’t—“  
“Calypso went alone to Weisshaupt?” the mage said. Now she definitely sounded angry. “You didn’t go with her? Make sure this gets out?”  
Endreth shook his head, muttering feverishly. “No. No. Someone’s chasing us. First the damned champion of Kirkwall, now—“  
My blood froze. I shook my arm free from Salome and had made it a loud step forward into the clearing when a snarl rippled through the air behind me. Everyone froze. A few trees intervened between Endreth and the other wardens and I, but I felt certain they’d heard me blundering toward them with every intention to throttle Endreth for lying to me. I turned, already suspecting who’d be standing behind me.  
Sure enough, a pale white dog stood between the trees, lips pulled back from her teeth, mouth gaping. She leapt and I pulled an arm up in front of my face to shield myself. Salome acted faster, though, grabbing her staff in two hands and cracking it into her mother.  
The slender hound reeled from the blow, landed on her side and twisted back to her feet. She circled, hackles rising, and Salome followed her in a tight circle around me. I realized I’d been holding my breath and released it. I lowered my arm from my face and tried to calmly appraise my situation. Huna’s daughter shielded me from her mother’s wrath—for now—and Endreth and the other two wardens had yet to pinpoint from where my footfall had originated. Once Huna and the wardens converged, we would probably die. Maybe Adaar and Cole would reach us by then. Maybe I would grow wings and carry us out of here.  
In any case, I found my patience growing short. I found myself sick of all this equivocating bullshit.  
“Hey, mountain witch,” I said, arming myself with a knife from my belt, the circle Salome pivoted around me too small for me to wield Bianca with any accuracy. “You want to tell me why Endreth blamed you for everything? ‘Everything,’ in this case, means him slowly going insane, along with all of his friends.”  
The dog lowered its head and snarled again, and abruptly the white-haired woman circled us. Salome stopped following. She brandished her staff and stood at my shoulder, glancing backwards into the trees where we could hear the wardens speaking.  
“You have no experience of the Fade, dwarf,” Huna said. “You do not know the horrors one may stumble across in that strange land.”  
I laughed. “I’ve got more experience in the Fade than you’d think. Care to elaborate?”  
Huna smiled a cold smile, an expression that somehow failed to reach her eyes.  
“You have one thing correct,” she said. “I am a witch. I connected myself to nature in the Fade. But in my search for a spirit to bind myself to, I found something else.”  
My skin crawled. I’d been to the Fade with Hawke, and then again with Alistair and Isabela, and then again with Hawke and Adaar in some kind of weird reprise of my first time. I hadn’t been much of a fan, to be honest. Inexplicable things existed in the Fade—the Black City always visible but never accessible. Oceans where you could hear the tide but walk through the deepest basins without ever touching water.  
“What?” I asked, because Huna had fallen silent, regarding me with her face devoid of emotion.  
“I found a fear demon that had answered a very specific request,” she said. “It had mutated. It became something capable of infesting the minds of men, to magnify their fears, and in doing so increase the likelihood they would cry out for its aid.”  
I frowned, that old ‘puzzle pieces that won’t fit together’ feeling swimming back to the front of my mind.  
“It called itself Ramiroth, but that was not its true name. It adopted the name the wardens cried out. It accepted their sacrifices on the behalf of a dead Tevinter god. It glutted on their fear. And I found it.”  
She narrowed her eyes, lifted an eyebrow, and continued to move around us, almost gliding across the grass with how fluidly she walked. Wait, she’d—fused herself with a spirit of nature? Who the hell would do that? Salome moved closer against me, and I sensed my fierce protector had turned into more of a girl frightened of a story her mother told. I put one hand on the small of her back and with the other pulled Bianca free. Footsteps from behind us foretold a confrontation I couldn’t prepare for.  
Two warden warriors and one warden mage versus a frightened hedge mage and a stalwart dwarf companion-turned-leader. We’d last a handful of seconds, and that estimate proved my optimism.  
Huna’s eyes no longer dwelled upon us. She stared up into the branches overhead, and it seemed to me that wherever her gaze traveled, the wind stirred.  
“It told me of its purpose, but when I tried to tell others of what I’d found, they went insane. The demon needed sacrifices. So the weak-willed killed beneath the guise of bringing darkness down upon others, so that they might better see the light. I was driven from the city.”  
The footsteps drew closer, closer, and Endreth and his two companions appeared between the trees a few feet away, all with weapons drawn. Endreth weathered seeing Huna with a commendable lack of reaction—his eyes went wide and then he shook his head.  
“I should’ve known you’d be bound up in this,” he said.  
I had so many questions for him burning at the back of my mind, but I silenced them and focused on simultaneously quieting Salome and maybe—maybe quietly extracting us from this new confrontation. But Miller circled around and stood behind us, placing the point of his sword on my back. He leaned just enough weight onto the contact that I felt it through my coat. Stupid prick. He had to know this wouldn’t be a fight.  
Salome whimpered a little, and when I looked at her, her lips trembled, her eyes fixed on her mother. The look of a petrified little girl hoping her mom would protect her. It broke my heart, because I didn’t know whether or not Huna would. Hell—I’d do my damnedest in the witch’s stead. I pushed closer to the girl, putting my arm around her waist and pulling her close to me. I could feel her shaking. She’d never seen a real action like this, I guess, never had her life so obviously in peril. This couldn’t even be called ‘in peril’—this seemed more like ‘your life is almost definitely going to end.’  
Endreth pulled his attention from Huna and again his hands went to his face, to his eyes, to his temples. Spiders in his brain.  
“Ramiroth,” he said. His voice trembled. “I speak the name and it fills you. You are afire.”  
He swallowed. I watched the tendons in his neck move. “You are a fire.”  
Miller shifted his weight, jostling the tip of his sword against me. I scowled, trying not to wince.  
“Just like that, the call is gone? I won’t feel it anymore?”  
“It may take some time,” Endreth whispered, sweat glistening on his face and neck. “When I first heard the call, when Huna first told me of Ramiroth, it took weeks until the call ceased.”  
“Why are you doing this?” I shouted, unable to keep quiet. Hell, the sword would run me through first—maybe Salome could light everything on fire and run. Or electrocute everyone. Something. “You know what it’ll do to them! Fight it, dammit!”  
Endreth’s slate grey eyes riveted on me. They narrowed. He frowned, forehead wrinkling.  
“If I fight it,” he said. “My friends die. Who’s the hero in this, dwarf?”  
I opened my mouth and closed it again, speechless.  
“They’re not ready to die,” he said. “Neither am I. So I saved all of us. Tell me what’s wrong with that.”  
“You’re killing people!” I said. “You—“ Shit. I couldn’t say it. The words couldn’t get out of my throat, which abruptly felt drier than it’d ever been.  
“You killed Hawke!” I yelled the words with more force than I thought I could muster. I didn’t even really believe them, but what Cole had said earlier had chilled me—she was a good fight. A good fight. My soulmate, reduced to three words. A good fight. I lost my composure. I lunged. I rammed him with Bianca, stabbing her bayonet deep into his abdomen. I tripped over his feet and he tripped over mine and we slammed backward into a tree. The branches shook, releasing a cascade of leaves down over us. Miller shouted and so did Salome. Faced away from them, struggling with Endreth, I heard the telltale spark and sizzle of lightning—a scream. A crack of wood on wood.  
Endreth smacked at me but his struggles waned. I ensured that they waned when I heaved myself further upon him, sending the bayonet that crucial couple of inches further in.  
“I didn’t kill her,” he said, blood sloshing up and over his bottom lip as he spoke. With feeble fingers he grabbed my lapel and pulled me closer. I didn’t resist—hell, pulling me closer meant he’d die faster. “She found out about Calypso. She chased her. Weisshaupt.”  
He breathed thickly, heavily, blood trickling from his nostrils, now.  
“You’re not a hero,” he said, voice fading. “But neither am I.”  
I gritted my teeth and stepped backward, ripping Bianca away from him. The bayonet tore loose with a wet rip. I swung around, arming Bianca properly to deliver a bolt to the face of Salome’s assailant. I found Salome locked staff to staff with the warden mage, both of their faces twisted with the effort.  
I narrowed my eyes, a peculiar coldness settling across me. I lifted Bianca and—kachunk—sent a bolt into the warden mage’s temple. She wavered for a moment and then dropped, staff clattering against the trees. A quick survey of the stand of trees ascertained that Huna had vanished in the affray, and part of me felt bitterly angry—almost affronted—about that. How dare she incite such a confrontation and then vanish? How dare she leave her daughter here to fend for herself?  
How dare she dump all of this information into my conscious, and then leave me to parse it out, make sense of it, cope with what I’d done?  
Salome set her staff heavily back onto the ground and leaned onto it, then fell to her knees. Miller’s blackened corpse lay as testament to the inhuman force of lightning she’d summoned down upon him. I stepped forward and caught her, the feel of human warmth so comforting—I longed for it. I longed for anything but this pall of numbness that had sunk into my bones.  
Salome put her hands on my shoulders and lifted herself up partway. She kissed me and I didn’t resist it—I might have even kissed her back. I don’t remember. I wasn’t feeling myself. Whatever third party had control of me at that moment clearly thought I needed more reasons to hate myself.  
Her hands clasped at the back of my neck, and I settled my own just below her shoulders. She pulled away and fixed me with her blue eyes, blood and dirt smeared across her face. This time I kissed her, leaning forward, clutching her closer to me, selfishly needing her warmth.  
When we parted the second time, I let her sink back to her knees. She pressed herself against me, hugged me hard, her cheek against my chest.  
“Why didn’t she help us?” she whispered, so that I almost didn’t hear her. I set my hand on her head and stroked her hair.  
“I don’t know, Salome,” I said. I sighed. I needed to get out of here, I needed to get away from this—whatever this feeling was. “I don’t know.”  
It occurred to me that the man I’d killed had been her father.  


***  


We found Adaar and Cole trapped by an inquisitive mass of party-goers. Beneath my sense that I’d committed a rash, ill thought-out murder, I felt a sense of haste, a tension that made every hindrance we had to overcome before leaving an incomparable annoyance. We approached the Qunari’s looming figure and I began to push through the throng of people.  
“How do your people affix the metal to your horns?”  
“I’ve never seen a Qunari use a shield. I thought you were shields, haha!”  
“Were you personally part of the raid on Kirkwall?”  
Adaar looked unchanged, the dark melancholy clinging to his face, and he glanced up at me with visible relief. Cole grabbed onto my sleeve and clung there, apparently having become lost in the crowd.  
“Lingering longing, pain that pressed past his precarious control—Varric, he wanted to die,” Cole said. I shook my head, embracing the numbness now. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want Cole to excavate into my turbulent thoughts and—I don’t know. See what I’d done. Sense how I felt about it.  
I shoved past the final person and heard a gasp from the crowd, presumably once someone finally noticed the blood-splattered dwarf forcing his way through their midst.  
“Inquisitor,” I said.  
“Inquisitor, he said? Is that that Qunari?”  
“I heard the Inquisitor was Tal-Vashoth. Not Qunari at all.”  
“I’m still wondering about those gold plates on his horns.”  
“Time to go,” I said. Adaar turned his head, his stare still blank with grief and doubt. He nodded and stepped forward, the crowd parting before him. With ease he freed himself, and we hastened down the path toward the mansion’s open gates.  
How long before someone noticed the three bodies in the trees? Would it even happen tonight? Would it be days, weeks, until a servant tending the gardens noticed the malodorous breeze blowing off the trees? I clenched my jaw, seeing Endreth again, prostrated before me, blood spurting from his mouth when he spoke. Salome, at least, seemed to understand—Cole walked along behind me and I could feel his gaze, feel him assessing me, trying to understand so he could help. But the girl marched along, matching my brisk stride, staring straight ahead with a grim twist to her lips.  
We’d talk about it later. We’d talk about it all later. We passed the gates and I turned sharply toward Tantervale, pausing to remove Bianca from my back and wipe down the bayonet with a rag. We couldn’t walk into a city like Tantervale covered in blood. In the middle of the rural wasteland of the inland Marches, there existed few options for redeeming my clothes—it’d have to do. Hell, if anyone accosted us, I’d run them the hell through. Apparently that was something I did now.  
I took my coat off and instantly felt the night’s invasive chill settle into my bones. Not entirely sure what I intended to do, I guided us toward the city. It took hours, probably, and a light rain fell around us. Convenient solution to ‘blood-soaked clothing’ for me and Salome. The witch had escaped less sullied than me, but she looked like a walking disaster.  
“Are we stopping?” Adaar asked as we approached the first sullen farms crouching at the outskirts of the city. The Qunari, more bedraggled than ever, looked as though he were actively combatting the thoughts he’d told me about. I felt sorry for him, but my sympathy felt distant, and I shook my head.  
Kept walking. I should have felt more of a sense of exigency. I knew where Hawke had gone. But no way in hell did I have the strength to walk across Nevarra to Weisshaupt. I would do it, for her, but I had the opportunity to procure a fast mode of travel and I wasn’t going to waste it. I stopped at a farm house as the sun began to heft itself above the horizon, met with the only people also awake at this terrible hour, and purchased two of his horses.  
After pounding across Orlais astride magnificent Fereldan steeds and the varied array of outlandish creatures Adaar had collected, it felt wrong to disembark seated atop the sway-backed, scarred monstrosities that exemplified Marcher horses.  
“I dub thee Shitbrain and Slowpoke,” I said, leaning down over the saddle to pat Shitbrain on his densely haired shoulder. He immediately whipped his head around and tried to bite me. The rain continued and the horses expressed their displeasure fervently and frequently, swishing their tails and stamping their feet and stumbling as we turned around and set out.  
My plan: Push my less-than-merry band of compatriots, stopping as little as possible, until they all hated me. We put Adaar and Salome on Slowpoke and I watched the girl from the corner of my eye, frowning. She’d clearly been on a horse before—she took to it immediately, insisting on sitting in front. Adaar, a competent horseman himself, sat behind and stared listlessly along the path. Cole had clamored that he wanted to ride with me, so he sat behind me quite pleased with himself. As we rode, Adaar would dismount and walk at times, to give his poor beast a chance to not have a Qunari atop it.  
For days we traveled in silence, only speaking when the situation absolutely warranted words. The silence had a hallowed degree, at least for me—a numb sort of mania had settled into me, driving me forward at all moments. I slept poorly, even when we had occasion to stop at roadside taverns. I heard more and more about the battered mage traveling along what seemed to be much the same route as we did—I listened to the conversations nonchalantly at first, and then with increasingly rapt attention.  
It had to be Anders. I spent most nights lying at least partially awake, waking Salome or Cole when I needed to plunge into absolute unconsciousness. I trusted Salome less and less as we progressed toward Nevarra—I’d realized the day after the soiree in Tantervale that hearing the wardens and her mother discuss the cult had been her first induction into the madness such knowledge would bring. Previously she’d been the only untainted one among us. My stomach sank. I felt responsible.  
I felt responsible for all of this. I sat one night as the near-incessant rain pattered down upon us, poking at the long-dead, sodden remains of our fire. A noise from beside me signaled Salome’s sitting down to join me. I glanced at her and then back to the fire, and Salome seemed content to watch me idly trying to resurrect what was never coming back to life.  
“Who’s Hawke?” she asked finally. Her voice sounded very quiet, almost tentative, compared to the impetuous, brash tone I’d become accustomed to hearing from her.  
It occurred to me that I’d never explained the true nature of this mission. I’d assimilated the girl into my quest without even elucidating its causes—granted, I doubt she’d have been excluded even if I’d tried, but I still felt guilty. I felt guilty about a lot of things, those days. My mind dredged up failures committed years in the past and I felt the pain of my regret as sharply and vividly as though they’d transpired the day before.  
“An old friend of mine,” I said, not even thinking about the response. A lot of more detailed descriptors drifted through my mind—my best friend, my soulmate, the woman I want to platonically spend the rest of my life with. Hawke had historically disapproved of my on-and-off relationship with Bianca, just as I’d historically disapproved of any and all of her love interests. And let’s face it, I’d been right. Because right now one of her love interests had gone insane and had invested himself in chasing her other love interest across Thedas, apparently.  
Sometimes I thought that we disapproved of each other’s relationships because we knew intrinsically that we belonged together. I maintain that it’s not romantic, it’s never been romantic—I mean, one time Hawke got drunk and kissed me, but she legitimately laughed and then threw up afterward, so I’m going to reaffirm that it’s not a love connection. It’s more than that. People who think your soulmate is always the one you marry and have babies with—they must live such disappointing, myopic lives. I could marry Bianca and live with her and have a family and I’d never be satisfied. The thought of retiring with Hawke in the country—it’s the only thought that has ever brought me peace.  
So basically we’d met each other and doomed each other’s chances at a romantic union with anyone else. That’s what friends are for, right?  
Salome probably sensed that I’d omitted some details, because she continued to stare at me, sifting dirt back and forth between her hands.  
“No, but who is she?” she said.  
“The Champion of Kirkwall,” I said. “I wrote a book about her.”  
“I heard of her,” Salome said. “But I was young when my mom talked about it.”  
I nodded, then froze, wondering how old Salome was. The guilt swam back and I remembered kissing her—shit. I have really got to devise some better ways of coping with abrupt stress and moral complications than kissing girls whose ages I am unfamiliar with.  
I thought that maybe I understood the piercing quality to her stare, now. I sighed.  
“Look, Zap—“  
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “It’s fine. I don’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to know who Hawke is. Really.”  
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “She’s my best friend, Zap. I love her.”  
She looked down upon me and crossed her arms.  
“We’ll find her,” she said after a long moment. “You should sleep.”  
I didn’t mention that my concern didn’t involve not finding Hawke—the universe pulled us together as often as it dragged us apart. I worried about in what state I’d find her. Would finding her dead be easier than not finding her at all? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to think about it.  


***  


I lost track of myself. I don’t know how else to explain it. I knew, somewhere in the part of my mind that still held the fragmented pieces of me, that Adaar had also experienced this transformation. Cole had described the descent into insanity as no longer knowing which thoughts came from your own mind, and which came from the presence of the cult in your brain. I understood that now—hell, I lived it.  
We rode forward, progressing each day, waking before the sun began to rise and riding until the moon rose. We slept little and I watched my companions begin to drift. I didn’t care. I wanted to care, but I didn’t. I stumbled forward in a focused fugue. Now that I knew where to find Hawke, I would move toward Weisshaupt until Shitbrain dropped dead beneath me and my friends forsook me. I didn’t care. I couldn’t tell if this immense endurance, this immunity to fatigue and hunger, came from the deep reserves of hardihood I possessed as a dwarf (is that a thing? Do dwarves do that? Again, probably not the best example of my kind) or if the madness lent me this extraordinary impetus.  
I didn’t mind. My emotional state—I didn’t think about it often, because if the madness were the cause behind my momentum, it’d also caused the numbness that had descended after I’d killed Endreth to linger. I woke up every morning from my bleary half-sleep and I didn’t feel, just woke everyone else and mounted and continued. We didn’t really talk, after my conversation with Salome. I knew on some level that all of us suffered from the effects of the Suns’ curse.  
Sometimes I wondered why I felt it so potently, all of the sudden. As Cole had described it, as a dwarf, I ought to have had some immunity. At first I tried to conjure the memory I’d used to stave off the illusion in Kirkwall—but this didn’t feel like something I needed to fight off. It felt like waking up from a nap and you’re wrapped too tightly in your blanket and the sun’s gotten a bit too hot, and it takes a moment and then you realize that you’re sweating and sort of trapped and smothered. I hadn’t reached the point in that scenario where I became too uncomfortable to throw the blanket off. I still felt soft and relaxed, content to be numb.  
Being numb meant I didn’t have to think about how I’d killed Salome’s father in front of her. Didn’t have to debate whether or not Endreth had really needed to die.  
We were traversing a particularly barren and hostile part of Nevarra, the horses listless and stumbling beneath us. Cole leaned against me and his heat plus mine meant that I sweated through my coat, sweated until my eyes stung and I stopped taking swigs from our flasks, because I felt pretty sure that every drink I took immediately vanished out my pores. The kid had his chin on my shoulder, stared out across the landscape with his usual look of avid interest dulled beneath the crushing anvil of heat.  
He’d been just as silent as the rest of us. Either he’d picked up on the humor of his comrades, or something troubled him, as well.  
I began to notice blood dappling the dust at our horses’ feet. Then I began to notice supplies dumped along the path—bedding, then a sword, then food. The blood increased, streaked along the red earth as though something had been dragged. Then a vast patch of earth visibly disrupted—a scuffle, blood spattered with no form or regularity. I pulled up, although the restless drive inside me screamed that we keep moving. I grabbed Shitbrain’s mane and dismounted/fell off with style, managed to land on my feet.  
The prostrate figure a few feet ahead, lying beside the body of a draft horse, was Hawke.  
In a confusing, startling rush, I went from having no emotions to having too many. I grunted and ran forward, my footsteps impossibly loud in the echoing silence of true desolation. I dropped to my knees beside her and what I’d previously taken as her mount’s corpse lifted his head, blowing wet, warm air from blood-stained nostrils.  
“Hawke! Shit.” I lifted my hands above her, not knowing what to do. A startling pallor had crept across her, a bloody gash ripped from her hip almost down to her knee. Blood covered her from head to foot. Finally I seized hold of her and shook, and then I lost my mind and shook her harder, and kept shaking.  
“Fucking Maker, you fat buffoon, leave me alone.” I barely heard her, but the groan came from between her lips, and I left off rattling her brain around in her skull. I took my hands off of her, then touched her again, then leaned forward, angling my body down across her. I put my arms around her, scooping her broken body up off of the dust.  
“Ouch,” she said, the word just a hiss of air between her teeth. “Varric?”  
“Yeah, Hawke, it’s me,” I said.  
“What the hell are you doing to me?”  
Mentally I took a step back and looked at myself, and realized I had no idea.  
“Like is this a hug? Are you giving me a hug? What is this?”  
I laughed, set her back down on the ground. Sitting back, I tried to make sense of what implications this had—finding Hawke stranded and almost dead in the middle of the most barren part of Nevarra. It didn’t bode well. I hadn’t like the concept of Hawke charging off alone toward Weisshaupt to stop what by now would probably be an entire fortress full of cult-mad wardens, but the prospect of Calypso having reached Weisshaupt and tainted the wardens unimpeded sounded somehow worse.  
I believed in Hawke. I’d believed that by the time I found her, she would be knee-deep in shit and blood, already halfway through fixing the problem the only way she knew how.  
“I have so many questions,” I said. “One: Why the hell are you out here?”  
“Isn’t it funny?” she said, her voice a tiny rasp. “That I was headed to Weisshaupt anyway when I diverted to Kirkwall. Maybe if I hadn’t gotten distracted, none of this would’ve happened.”  
“Endreth said Calypso left for Weisshaupt months ago,” I said.  
“Even so,” she said. “I could’ve done something.”  
“We’re doing something now,” I said. “As soon as you stop bleeding.”  
She smiled wanly. “If I stop bleeding at this point, it probably means I’m dead.”  
“Hawke,” I said. She tipped her head toward me, sharp brown eyes finding mine. She looked—shit. Like one good slip away from death. “What happened to you?”  
“Druffalo,” she said. She flapped a hand at her horse, who had lain his head back down and continued to look deceased. “Was trying to get a rabbit, and I guess the druffalo took offense. Gored my horse. Then it gored me.”  
“How long ago?”  
“Shit. Days.” She shook her head. “I held on as long as I could.”  
“Yeah, well,” I said. “Apparently you and your horse are competing to see who’s going to live the longest with unimaginably grievous wounds.”  
She laughed. “His is worse. Druffalo got him right behind the ribs. Which reminds me.”  
Grabbing her sword, she pushed herself onto her good knee, leaving the other leg lain straight out, pinned awkwardly beneath her. She hefted the sword and before I could react, she swung the blade down and hacked deep into the horse’s throat. The beast managed one full-body flinch and then lay still, eyes dimming, hind legs kicking as its body settled. Hawke collapsed backward, losing her grip on her sword. I caught her, and she lay there strewn in my lap, breathing hard.  
“I’m glad to see you, Varric,” she said. “I guess you never got my letters, then.”  
“Long story,” I said. “Actually, not that long. Anders withheld them.”  
“Everything would’ve been better if you’d been with me,” she said, her voice fading.  
“Oh, Hawke,” I said. “You know I’m terrified of Druffalo.”  
Hawke smiled. She closed her eyes, exhaled. “You’re here now.”  
“I’m here, now.”  
Her breathing evened out and I shook my head. Adaar anticipated my need before I ever voiced it, dropping from Slowpoke and walking over. Together we maneuvered Hawke aboard Shitbrain, trying to jostle her ruined leg as little as possible. Fortunately the blood had been deceptive—I figured most of it had come from the Druffalo and her horse, as the only wound I found on Hawke’s body was the one on her leg. Granted, she’d probably lost enough blood from that wound to kill a lesser warrior.  
Sometimes I think Hawke’s survived this long due only to sheer willpower. She stares death straight in the eyeballs and says hell no, not today, and somehow death has always listened to her.  
Nonetheless, the wound looked grisly. The blood had coagulated around the edges, turning her thigh into a crusted red-black monstrosity. I looked it over, but I possessed no great medical ability, and I found myself positively longing for Anders to manifest out of nothing.  
If Fenris hadn’t killed him yet, maybe he’d catch up to us. And abruptly I found myself fervently hoping for the very thing I’d dreaded.  
“Keep her still, kid,” I instructed Cole, who nodded dutifully, happy as always to have a task. He wrapped his arms around Hawke’s ribcage and held her. I grabbed Shitbrain’s reins and led the horse, and Adaar followed suit with Slowpoke. Salome frowned down upon us, then shrugged and remained silent, twining her fingers through the horse’s mane as the Qunari led him.  
“You can ride,” Adaar said, looking at me sideways. “I’ll walk.”  
“No,” I said. “Thanks, Pup, but I’ll just walk.” Cole seemed comfortable sitting astride the horse with Hawke clutched against him (I positively longed to witness her reaction upon waking to find a spirit holding her tight) and I didn’t want to ride with Salome. Because of—reasons.  
It had become so awkward between us. Partially because both of us struggled with our individual madness, and partially because (I’m assuming) I’d heinously taken advantage of her naiveté and had found every one of my attempts to make things right met with her blasé assertions that she didn’t want to talk about it. And then I hadn’t wanted to talk about anything, and now apparently we were playing ‘who can ignore the other person for the longest.’  
Adaar shrugged in a ‘suit yourself’ kind of way and we kept on. I’d been nurturing an imbecilic hope that we’d find a tavern to stop at—Cole reassured me that Hawke continued to breathe, that her color had begun to return, but my gut twisted when I thought about finding her and then having her succumb to her wounds on the way to Weisshaupt.  
I stopped us just before the sun set, to a chorus of bewildered looks.  
“Stopping already?” Salome said, dismounting and landing heavily, refusing to look at me. “But I’m not about to drop from exhaustion, Varric, it can’t be time yet.”  
I rolled my eyes, coordinated with Cole and Adaar to slip Hawke from the horse’s back. Adaar pushed and Cole stabilized and I caught her. I’d carried her upstairs in the Hanged Man enough times to be accustomed to her weight.  
Whereas our previous journey through the unpopulated parts of the Marches had been plagued with rain, dust and heat plagued us through the unpopulated parts of Nevarra. That night, the heavy winds brought thick red-grey clouds scudding across the sky, and the hottest rain I’d ever felt pelted down on us. Hawke woke when the first drops struck her, blinking and pushing herself up onto her elbows.  
“What the hell,” she said, looking at me with an accusatory glint to her eyes, as though I’d personally summoned the rain to torment her.  
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “It’s been dry the entire time until we found you, so as far as I’m concerned, this is your doing.”  
She smiled, but pain creased her face as she moved to sit up. She stretched her injured leg out in front of her and stared into the fire, which guttered and died as the rain increased.  
“I don’t know why you bothered lighting a fire,” she said. “Nights here are hotter than the days.”  
“Creature comfort,” I said. “Spent too much time in the Frostbacks and now my guts are covered in a permanent layer of frost.”  
She nodded. “What all do you know, Varric? About the Suns?”  
“Well, I don’t know, apparently it’s alive and lives in the Fade and wants us all to kill people and sacrifice them to a dead Tevinter god.” I laughed and realized how sharp and bitter I sounded. “Huna said it’s a fear demon,” I said, a little softly.  
“Yeah,” Hawke said. I caught her staring across the fire, a little pointedly, at Salome. “Tell me again why the witch’s daughter is with us?”  
“Um,” I said. “She wanted to come.”  
Hawke lifted an eyebrow at me. Shit, I couldn’t withstand that silent appraisal.  
“I kissed her,” I said. “I think she had a crush on me and I killed her dad and she… uh, we kissed.”  
Both eyebrows lifted. Hawke nodded slowly, then narrowed her eyes and punched me hard in the shoulder.  
“You’re a fucking asshole,” she said.  
“But you love me,” I said. We sat very close together, and after a moment I leaned against her. Without a word she adjusted her balance to compensate for my weight, resting with her legs out in front of her with both palms against the ground.  
“Yeah, I do,” she said after a moment. “I do.”  
“We don’t have to go to Weisshaupt, Hawke.” She started shaking her head the instant the words were out of my mouth. She continued, and I knew what she would’ve done if she’d had the use of both legs—she would’ve jumped up and begun to pace.  
“Just listen to me,” I said. “You’re hurt. We can turn around and find a healer and then we can—go and get Aveline, or go back to Skyhold. Get reinforcements. We’re talking about a warden fortress—“  
“I’ve taken a warden fortress already,” she said. “Remember Adamant? I can do it again.”  
“Hawke,” I said.  
“Varric,” she said. “I’m going to Weisshaupt. And I need you to come with me. I don’t care about anyone else. If you’re with me, I can do this.”  
She fixed me with a reproachful look, lips drawn into a tight line. A look that brooked no disagreement. And, hell, she had to know I’d never argue with her anyway, not when I knew she meant every word.  
I sighed. “Yeah, I know. I know you can do this. I’m with you, Hawke. You know that.”  
She nodded once. “Good.”  
We sat in companionable silence for a while, before Hawke pulled her legs beneath her with a low groan and lay down on her side.  
“Thank you for finding me,” she muttered, already half asleep. “I’m lost without you.”  
I opened my mouth but couldn’t find the words. So I just watched her fall all the way asleep, stroking her short red hair, listening to her soft, rhythmic breathing. Feeling the madness recede.  
“So we’re going to Weisshaupt?” Adaar asked, standing behind me.  
“We’re going to Weisshaupt,” I said. The Qunari grunted and set himself down to watch, and I sunk to the ground with my back against Hawke’s and fell truly, deeply asleep for the first time in a week.  


***  


I awoke with a pall of mist having settled across the barren desert.  
I waved my hand through the air, but the mist had an immutable quality that I immediately identified as otherworldly. Shit. I scrambled to my feet and noticed another odd thing—when I’d fallen asleep, everyone had been arrayed on the ground around me. Now I sat alone, no sign of even the horses.  
Immediately I sensed what had happened. My certainty grew once I noticed a copse of dead, grey trees a few feet away, where previously only desolation had reined. Moreover, the ‘barren desert’ upon which I’d fallen asleep had melted away around me, replaced by a dense tangle of jungle. The steady thrum of insects hummed at the back of my conscious, and everything smelled like rain. This had to be the Fade—a glance to the sky proved as much, because yep—the Black City balanced on a floating precipice miles overhead. Unreachable. I shuddered. Dwarves notoriously possessed no connection to the Fade, and yet I always seemed to end up here.  
Call me lucky, I guess. Or, more appropriately, the exact opposite of lucky.  
One thing I had learned from my various forays into the Fade—I’d never been dragged in accidentally. There had to be a purpose. I stood up, arming myself with Bianca, and that’s when I spotted the pale enigma standing between me and the trees. Huna. The dog shifted and changed, as though an invisible wind dragged at her. Vines pushed up from the earth, verdant tendrils curving around her legs. As much as I didn’t want to, I walked toward her, not seeing any other recourse. Moving through the mist felt like swimming—the air hung around me, limp and humid, and my limbs felt heavy by the time I reached Huna.  
The witch turned and moved toward the trees, the vines retracting and emerging around her paws with each step. I followed her. It felt exactly like moving through a dream that you’re half-aware is a dream, which, I guess, is exactly what the entire Fade is.  
The trees formed a loose ring, and on the inside a dark presence lurked. I lifted Bianca, narrowing my eyes along her as I took aim. At what, I didn’t know yet, but I’d be damned ready once the presence manifested into something shootable.  
“You will need to know where to find it,” Huna said, the dog’s mouth unmoving, the voice assaulting me on all sides. I couldn’t decide which option would’ve been more startling—the dog talking, or this odd disembodied version of her voice.  
“What?”  
She glanced toward me, then past me, folded ears leaping upward as a monumental thunderous crash rippled through the air. I felt the sound more than I heard it—magic crashed over me like a wave. I stumbled backward and landed on my ass, the trees dematerializing around me. I sat in the undergrowth, trying to get my bearings. Huna had vanished. Again the crash washed across me—I cringed, bracing myself. The sound made my guts quiver and twist, filled me with a sense of dread that I couldn’t fight.  
“What the hell!” I shouted because I couldn’t think of what else to do. And abruptly Fenris appeared, marching through the low verdure with his sword out to the side. He fixed his gaze on me and in the next instant he charged, swinging his sword up as he came.  
I tried to scramble to my feet but the resonant sound crashed through me again and I stumbled, hit the ground on my knees. Anders lunged forward beside me and threw his hands out before him—a magical barrier appeared and Fenris crashed into it.  
Anders screamed. The tension and pain and rage written across the mage’s face told me everything—how long he’d been fighting this battle, in the physical realm during the day and in the Fade at night. He drew back a little and then threw the rest of his energy into the barrier, shouting hoarsely.  
“Varric!” My name tore from his throat, and the barrier flickered. Fenris roared, swung his sword again, steel striking the barrier and almost—almost—breaching it. I scrambled the rest of the way to my feet, gritting my teeth as the sound recurred.  
“What the hell is that!” I screamed, as the rolling sound reverberated in my bones.  
“I don’t know,” Anders said. The barrier failed. The mage collapsed backward, catching himself in a crouch, panting hard. My turn. I didn’t relish this—I raised Bianca and loosed a bolt that screamed past Fenris’ ear.  
He whipped around and snarled at me, the lines of lyrium lighting blue across his skin. He charged, heaving his sword up against his shoulder.  
He swung as I backpedaled, fumbling as I tried to get another bolt free. Hawke screamed and pounded up beside me, swung her own sword—the two met, sparks scintillating along the length of their swords.  
Hawke yelled again and thrust the elf’s sword downward, forcing the point into the dust. Their faces inches apart, I could see her face twisted in anger and confusion. She pulled back and kicked him in the stomach, forcing her weight onto her wounded leg in the process. The leg gave and she fell, landing on the knee and screaming, a sound I’d give my entire fortune to never hear again.  
Fenris staggered, but recovered quickly. He swung his sword high overhead and I thought—Maker, I really thought he’d end Hawke in the next moment. But Anders lunged forward and threw up another barrier, this one weaker yet than the last. The mage couldn’t hardly stand, and I quickly armed another bolt and fired, catching Fenris’ attention again.  
“Stop missing, you imbecile!” Anders yelled, his voice hoarse. The pallor laying across him intensified as he poured mana into his barrier. It couldn’t last forever—but I knew he’d die before he let Fenris kill a wounded Hawke.  
“You want me to kill him?” I heard how desperate I sounded. I jammed another bolt into Bianca, raised her to my chin. Fenris sent his blade crashing again into the barrier. He faltered a little when the sound rattled through all of us again—a fraction of an instant of hesitation, not enough to win us any real time.  
“Yes!”  
“No!” Hawke lunged back to her feet, crying out as she stamped weight onto her gored leg, which had begun to bleed again. “You kill him, I kill you!”  
She fixed me with an animated glare for an instant and I saw the same desperation in her that I felt myself. The ex-Tevinter slave was the closest thing to a significant other Hawke had ever had—I knew the promise of a life with him had kept her going during those final tense days in Kirkwall.  
The sound came again, louder this time. And in the distance, something stirred. Fenris left off, dropping the point of his sword into the dust and turning to face the horizon. We all did. With the back of the elf’s head in my sights, I lowered Bianca.  
A dragon lifted itself above the horizon. But it wasn’t a flesh-and-blood dragon like those we’d fought in Orlais—this one just had a skeleton, with scraps of decaying flesh hanging from yellowed bones. It made a horrifying nose as it made its clumsy ascent—the sound of a hundred ancient bones scraping together. It opened its mouth and again that teeth-rattling sound echoed through me.  
“It hears them calling,” Cole said, abruptly right behind me. I whirled on him and he stared straight past me, riveted on the dragon, expression frozen in blank terror. “It’s going to meet them. We have to follow it.”  
Huna padded up beside me. “The years have made him strong,” she said.  
I looked down and the dog looked up to meet my eyes.  
“You are leading my daughter into unimaginable danger,” she said. “You must defeat him here, in his domain. If he hears you call, he will come.”  
“Fantastic,” I said. In the distance, the dragon had reached a suitable height and turned, beginning to flap off.  
“I suppose he’s going to Weisshaupt, then,” Hawke said, managing a step in my direction before she collapsed, slung an arm across my shoulders and only just remained standing, most of her weight on me.  
“Yes,” Huna said.  
“The wardens have summoned Ramiroth,” Huna said. “Or the demon that has grown powerful on their supplication. I would advise you to hurry.”  
Hawke began to push herself up off of my shoulders in preparation to leave, but I wasn’t finished.  
“Why are you helping us, now?”  
I fell beneath the concerted stare of everyone assembled.  
“I have no grudge against you, dwarf,” Huna said. “I am merely a watcher. This is a dead god, reinvisioned. These bones should have remained buried. You are an instrument of the universe, come to set this right. I am simply here to watch, to guard and guide.”  
Come to set this right. I laughed, but even to me it sounded short and bitter.  
“There’s nothing right about any of this,” I said. “It’s just me, killing a bunch of people who aren’t ready to die.”  
“Varric, this will destroy everything if it’s allowed to leave Weisshaupt,” Hawke said, her voice sharp with her habitual cold reason. “It’s already killed six people in Kirkwall, and that cult began because of the words of two wardens.”  
“Eight people,” I corrected her offhand.  
With the dragon gone, Fenris abruptly came back alive—he’d been standing with his back to us, breathing heavily. Now he whirled and I saw very briefly the touch of anguish light across Anders’ face—his grip tightened around his staff and the color drained from his lips.  
But Adaar, bursting from the trees a couple of feet away, parried the elf’s blow and in the next instant smashed his shield into Fenris’ shoulder.  
“Come on!” the Qunari shouted, rallying us with a wave of his sword. He charged back off into the jungle and when I went to look for Huna, I found the dog gone again, and Salome standing behind me with that same tortured look on her face. I proved too slow for Hawke, who stomped forward with a bestial grunt. Anders swooped in to grab her, and they hobbled off together after Adaar. I grabbed Salome’s hand and dragged her forward as Fenris thrashed in the tangle of thorns where he’d landed.  
We ran through the jungle until the mist thinned and then the jungle thinned and then we were all standing in the desolation of Nevarra’s border with the Anderfels. Mountains rose, jagged against a horizon that’d been flat for days. I breathed a sigh through pursed lips and tried to feel optimistic.  
A doomed endeavor, of course, with the prospect of the Anderfels in my sights. Nobody goes to the Anderfels. Nobody. I’d rather, at all times, maintain a distance of at least two countries away from this accursed land. All it has any claim to is dust, pointy rocks, and Darkspawn. All the time with the Darkspawn. Doesn’t matter if there’s an active Blight. The Anderfels are the ruling capital of the Darkspawn empire in Thedas.  
Salome wrested her hand from mine with a disgusted sound low in her throat, and I tried not to be offended. She didn’t stalk away from me, though, and I watched her as she passed an unimpressed eye across our destination.  
“Let’s go,” Hawke said. She walked only with significant aid from Anders, who held onto her with a mystified look that I hated—as though he just couldn’t believe he had his hands on her again.  
“Hawke, you—“  
“I’m fine,” she said, frowning at me. “Let’s go.”  
We got her back up on Shitbrain, although I’m certain she would’ve insisted on walking if we’d allowed her any word in edgewise. Anders and I nodded at each other, and I found myself almost—satisfied that we’d found him. He looked like shit raked over a fire, but refused a seat on either horse. He walked beside me, neither of us speaking, just walking with our heads down. The wind increased until it screamed across us, throwing handfuls of dust in my eyes.  
We plodded forward until the butte appeared, until pillars of jagged stone jutted from the earth and the landscape changed. Weisshaupt sat on a precarious ledge jutting from the vestiges of the Hunterhorns, and I felt what remained of my hope draining from me as we approached. The mountains reared up, the wind positively sharp with debris, and beneath it all I felt a stab of nerves—you didn’t wander into a place notorious for its Darkspawn presence and not encounter some of the gnarly bastards.  
“A little farther,” Anders said beside me, the wind whipping his hair into his face. “And then I need to rest. I can take care of Hawke’s leg if I can sleep first.”  
He looked at me and he seemed wary. I imagine I’d changed a little in the time since we’d last seen each other—I didn’t smile, didn’t offer anything in the way of a retort. I just nodded. I realized, then, what had changed in our dynamic—we all felt a little wary of one another. The madness had touched all of us save perhaps Anders, although seeing the dragon might have sewn it in him. With Justice/Vengeance seated inside the mage, I’d hoped to keep him from the Suns entirely.  
I couldn’t trust anyone. Finding Hawke had unburdened me of a great deal, but it’d not been the heartfelt reuniting I’d envisioned, because hell, I’d read the letter she left for me with Fenris. The madness hadn’t just touched her, it’d festered inside her, sent her off on this madcap journey. I knew, somewhere within her, its influence remained.  
But I wasn’t crazy enough yet to face a fear demon that man’s hopes had imbued with the power of a dead Tevinter god alone. And I don’t think any of my companions were crazy enough to allow me to try. So we continued, eyes always on our own backs.  


***  


I awoke to Cole’s face an inch away from mine.  
“They’re singing. Can you hear them? Don’t listen.”  
Chaos erupted around me. A gnarled sword struck the rock directly beside me and I rolled to the side and scrambled to my feet, throwing Cole off of me. Another strike sheared sparks from the rock at my feet and I grabbed Bianca from where I’d set her on the ground, fired a bolt into a Darkspawn’s chest. It squealed, grasping at the protruding shaft, and fell.  
Cole had forced himself into a cleft in the rock and covered his ears with his hands, squeezing his eyes shut.  
“They’re singing!” he shouted.  
I swore and lunged at him, grabbing him by the shoulder and trying to pry him out of his shelter. But the kid attacked me so frantically, he drew blood when he scratched me, and another wave of Darkspawn pounded down upon us. I threw my back against the wall of stone and got bolts through two of them, then spun and ran one through with Bianca’s bayonet. I fell backward and narrowly missed being hit with a gout of noxious blood. Panting, I reloaded, and brained another one, firing a handful more bolts before I could consider us momentarily safe. Maker knew, where there was one Darkspawn, there were forty thousand Darkspawn.  
“Adaar!” I shouted. “Anyone! Shit, why’d I get stuck with the scared child as my buddy?”  
“I’m s-sorry, Varric!” Cole yelled, his voice quivering and breaking. “It’s all I can hear, it’s—they’re singing, and it’s always songs I don’t want to hear.”  
I edged sideways and pushed myself partway into the cleft beside him. It wouldn’t fit both of us, but at least I could remain partially hidden.  
“It sounds like drowning,” Cole whispered from the darkness behind me. “Pushes me down beneath the water—face fading fast, frozen for a second before I’m so cold I—I’m dying, Varric, I—“  
I twisted in the cleft and pushed my palm against his mouth. I shuffled a couple of inches further in.  
“Listen to something else, kid,” I said as quietly as I could. I traded raking a vigilant gaze across the darkness outside the cleft and meeting Cole’s wide, pale eyes. “Remember? That’s what you told me, and it worked. Listen to something else.”  
Cole stared at me for a long moment before he nodded. He closed his eyes and exhaled, his hands clenching and unclenching, fingertips scraping the sides of the cleft.  
I turned back to face the outside, raising Bianca and almost firing a bolt directly into Adaar’s chest as the Qunari appeared through the night. He had his sword and shield ready, blood dripping from a gash above his brow. I didn’t want to know what had reached so high on a Qunari to gash his goddamn forehead, and I also didn’t want to hang around and find out.  
“Okay, one: could you have taken any longer? Two: Can anyone tell me what the hell just happened?” I said, extricating myself from the crevice. Cole followed, serene now, clinging to my arm but remaining silent. I kicked and/or stepped on a number of what I hoped were all Darkspawn corpses as I stumbled toward Adaar.  
A light appeared nearby, and Anders picked his way forward through the bodies, the shadows beneath his eyes having grown considerably.  
“They ambushed us,” he said. “Split us up. There will be more.”  
Sometimes I forgot Anders had been a warden. Or—still was a warden, technically. Salome stepped forward to stand at the other mage’s shoulder, eying the light he’d summoned at the tip of his staff.  
“Can you teach me how to do that?” she asked.  
Anders glanced toward her as if noticing her for the first time. He smiled a quick, bemused smile.  
“Maybe later,” he said.  
I jumped a good few inches when Hawke collapsed onto me, just as I’d been on the cusp of asking after her whereabouts. She dragged herself up, but her body appeared to be in the midst of a revolt—she ended up slouched against me, holding herself up with her hands wrapped in the fabric of my coat.  
“Anders,” I said.  
“I’m fine,” she mumbled, sounding as though even she didn’t believe it anymore.  
Anders nodded. He stepped over the littered Darkspawn corpses and knelt before me and Hawke, the vibrant green glow lighting around his hands. I watched him begin to shake—but his resolution didn’t waver. His breath rattled in his throat, and I observed his progress with a keen interest that faded into a sort of half-consciousness.  
“I listened to your heartbeat,” Cole said, and I jarred back into full awareness. I quirked an eyebrow at him.  
“What?”  
“I told you to listen to something else, but when I needed to, I forgot. You reminded me. So I listened to your heartbeat. It makes me real again. It feels like the stone.”  
I smiled. I couldn’t explain why, but hearing the kid say that—that I’d provided him a tether to his fragile sense of being real—made me feel more like a person than I’d felt in days. I patted him on the shoulder, pulled him against my side. He stayed there, crushed against me, hat knocked askew, a smile on his face.  
It took a few minutes and most of Anders’ energy, but eventually the mage pulled back. He tried to stand up and fell down instead. He landed hard, collapsing onto his shoulder, breathing hard. Hawke’s eyes narrowed and she grabbed his arm and hauled him back to his feet, simultaneously testing the renewed weight-bearing capacity of her leg. I couldn’t decipher her expression—she looked angry, but then Hawke always looked a little angry.  
“I need to rest,” Anders said. Every inch of his skin quivered. His eyes looked sunken. But even I knew that we couldn’t afford for him to recuperate.  
“Then stay here,” Hawke said. She crossed her arms and they faced off.  
The entire world around me shook. Their impasse ended as a deafening, bone-rattling roar echoed through every level of my consciousness—I felt myself yelling but couldn’t hear it. The roar ended and a rhythmic booming began, each strike resonating through the air, until I recognized them as wingbeats. Shit.  
No way were we in any condition to face the dragon we’d seen flying in the Fade. Wait—how had it gotten out of the Fade? I guess if a team of ragtag, decrepit, exhausted, and wounded adventurers could stumble their way out of the place, a giant undead dragon could, too. The beast appeared from behind a distant peak, each strike of its wings laborious. It looked far too heavy to fly without any actual skin between its bones, but indeed it flew. Toward us. Quickly.  
I’d been intending to look around for Shitbrain and Slowpoke, to see if they’d survived. Instead, I abandoned them, shouting a drowned adjuration and running. I slammed into Salome and she stumbled.  
“Shoot! Lightning!” I shouted. No time for sentences. She nodded, tipped her head dubiously toward the dragon banking down toward us. She lifted her staff and stamped it onto the ground—I’d passed her by then, but the flash of light from behind me signified the disastrous amount of energy she’d poured into the attack.  
The deafening roar filled my world again. Overhead, the beast’s skeletal jaws stretched wide—I honestly couldn’t tell if it planned to attack us, because it didn’t really have eyes, and its face remained focused straight ahead. Either way, I didn’t intend to dawdle and find out. We had to reach Weisshaupt.  
That’s right, I planned to burst through the doors of a warden fortress in the utter black of the night with an undead dragon a-hunting outside. I planned to do so functioning beneath the assumption that every warden within the walls would be under the influence of an ancient Tevinter-influenced cult based around the worship of a dead god.  
These cultists were known to enjoy murdering people. And yet I thought I’d still prefer their company to the dragon who’d just cleared Broken Tooth and Weisshaupt, and now plunged down toward us. If it were aiming for anything aside from us, it had very bad aim.  
I ducked, heard Salome cry out, and the edges of my vision lit up once again. The beast cried out and I gritted my teeth and increased my pace. Dwarves aren’t exactly known for being celeritous creatures, and soon Cole and Salome joined me. I chanced a look backward and saw Hawke struggling along with Anders, who’d passed out somewhere along the line—as I watched, Adaar pounded up alongside Hawke and heaved the unconscious mage across his broad shoulders.  
Hawke leapt forward and in an instant she matched my pace. I took a moment to appreciate how good it felt, to be running like hell away from certain death with her, no matter our usual proclivity to run in the opposite direction. We reached the base of Broken Tooth and started climbing the path upward. Running became climbing in some spots—I grabbed hold of rocks and at one point lacked the strength and height to quite lever myself up and over a particular boulder. Adaar put his horns beneath my feet and with one mighty heave, threw me over.  
By the time we’d reached the halfway point, Weissahupt looming dark and foreboding in front and up from us, the dragon had crashed into the ground—not much for landing, I guess—then turned and launched itself at us again. Our position had grown rather precarious. I wheeled as the rest of the party ran past me—I aimed and shot off three bolts, which (what the hell had I expected?) struck the skeletal dragon’s bones but bounced off.  
So I guess my part in this battle would be—bait. The dragon roared and I bloody well roared back, until I noticed its wings tilt, its level course tipping into a descent. Toward me. I left off yelling like a lunatic and took off after my compatriots.  
The dragon passed overhead and the wind screamed for its passing. I hit the ground, landed hard on my chest.  
“Varric!” Hawke screamed, out of—anger at my holding them up? Concern for my suddenly being on the ground? In any case, she came sprinting back through the crowd as Adaar threw himself bodily at the grand doors of the defunct fortress. Good. Our first impression to the hundred or so cult-crazed wardens would be a bloodied Qunari bursting through their doors.  
I rolled over onto my back and Hawke grabbed my hands, pulled me back to my feet, punched me between the shoulder blades as I raced toward the doors two heartbeats ahead of her.  
The doors swung inward and Adaar crashed through, losing his balance on the grand stone entryway. The rest of us pounded in after him, and the pair of wardens responsible for heaving the doors open leaned their shoulders in and began the ponderous journey of closing them.  
I motioned to Hawke and threw myself against the wood beside one warden. Hawke did the same on the second door, and we managed to get them closed. My last glimpse of the outside included the skeletal dragon bellowing, gazeless stare fixed on us as it beat its wings and worked itself back around for another pass.  
My new warden friend and I shared a moment of solidarity as we both leaned our backs against the monumental door and panted.  
“Varric,” Hawke said, her voice rebounding through the hall. “I’d thought the goal was to run toward the dragon.”  
“Don’t think of it as running away, Hawke,” I said. “Think of it as taking a shortcut that doesn’t involve us dying horribly.”  
She laughed shortly, before pushing herself off of the door and stepping into the center of the hall. Adaar, still with Anders draped across his shoulders, turned in a slow pivot, taking in what I could only describe as ‘dusty grandeur’ of the ancient warden fortress. A broad staircase led up into what I assume would be quarters, but hallways ran off to the left and right of it. It’d seemed monumental in size and scope from outside, but inside it just felt empty. Not even a carpet. Just the bare stone, and a sense of stern, oppressive age.  
Cole crept close, his hoarse whisper echoing through the vast, cavernous space.  
“It’s too much,” he said. “They’re crumbling. You can’t see it and neither can they. But they can hear it, if they listen. They want to.”  
I clenched my fists. The wind battered this place like nothing else—if it weren’t seated so deep within the rock itself, it would’ve been shaking with every gust. A few half-hearted sconces attempted to provide light, but only succeeded in deepening the darkness.  
The two wardens still stood by the doors.  
“Travelers may spend the night in the guest quarters,” one of them said, seeming perfectly normal except that he refused to make eye contact or speak like anything besides a cult-possessed drone.  
“Gotcha,” I said, as they walked past us and up the stairs. “Okay, sidebar, no way am I sleeping in a guest room in this possessed helltown.”  
Seriously, it stank like the mold had started to mold. I could almost feel the spores sewing in my lungs.  
Adaar sat down first, set himself heavily against the wall with a great clamor of rattling armor. I watched him begin to unbuckle his chestplate, mesmerized by the process—one buckle, then the next, then the next, patiently and meticulously working until the piece came off and the Qunari sat there in his sweat-soaked undershirt. As the sort of guy who dies when struck with something pointy, I’ve always found it fascinating to watch warriors remove armor. Hey, it’s not creepy if you’re a dwarf. It’s our natural disposition to be intrigued by armor, or something.  
The Qunari seemed even more subdued than he’d been, but I’d been woken up in the middle of the damn night by a Darkspawn greeting party and then an undead dragon without a soul, and I wasn’t about to forsake my opportunity to sleep indoors. Anders stirred, and when he sat up, Hawke put a hand on his shoulder as she moved past him to sit beside me. The mage looked more ragged than I’d ever seen him, and in the past few weeks I’d already broken that record a couple of times. He pushed himself against the wall and immediately fell back asleep.  


***  


I woke up to the sound of a number of people gathering around me. I blinked and saw probably eighteen wardens, with a dark-haired woman at their head. That chased the last of the sleep from my mind, and you can bet I sat up faster than I ever had.  
I kicked Hawke as subtly as possible, which ended up being ‘not subtly at all.’ Panic tends to make me a little less covert. The woman cast an unimpressed gaze across us—Adaar sat up and then jumped into a crouch, slipping his sword from its sheath and waiting. And then, just as I thought it probably time for me to break the silence and forestall us all being killed as trespassers, the woman… smiled.  
“Hello,” she said. “Met our dragon?”  
I opened my mouth, then exhaled and smiled back at her, rolling onto my stomach and pushing myself up to stand.  
“Calypso, I presume?”  
She swept into a teasing bow, rising with dark humor touching her face. “Yes.”  
“You seem very composed,” I said. Hadn’t been what I expected. To be honest, I expected more of a slavering, raving horde of cult-maddened wardens. The two we’d spoken to last night had seemed off, but maybe all the wardens stationed at Weisshaupt are just like that because of being stationed in the damned Anderfels.  
Calypso raised an eyebrow, stepped closer to us with a deliberate, confident stride. She entered our midst and Adaar stood all the way up, towering over her as she came to a stop right in front of him.  
“Ramiroth has been my salvation,” she said, running a critical eye up the Qunari’s body. Adaar narrowed his eyes and said nothing. “I fell to the shadows of the Deep Roads, and the sun found me.”  
It startled me, to hear her speak of the Suns so openly. Endreth had treated it like some poison on his tongue—it’d taken Miller and the warden mage a while to convince him to spit it out. He’d known the corrosive effect it would have—but here Calypso tossed out Ramiroth’s name as though it meant nothing. As though she wouldn’t infect us and drag us all into insanity merely by speaking the name. A flash of anger scorched through me. How dare she treat this so nonchalantly. It felt disrespectful to Endreth, to all those who had suffered at the hands of this cult throughout history.  
I wanted to tell her what Huna had told me—that a fear demon had repossessed the name of the god she so revered. That by tossing the name around and indoctrinating all these wardens, she was handing their minds to the demon and strengthening something inherently evil.  
At this point, I doubted she would care. I shared a glance with Hawke and immediately noticed something off in her stare—her eyes a little too wide, her forehead creased.  
“You want to tell me what happened here?” I asked, looking back toward Calypso. “I mean, I know Weisshaupt isn’t exactly renowned for being a cheery place, but I don’t think there’s usually an undead dragon flying around.”  
A smile briefly touched Calypso’s lips. “Right. Tell me who you are, first.”  
I kept the smile on my face, but it proved a valiant effort. Something steely and dangerous had crept into her tone. I admit to letting my guard down a little, when she proved so willing to not immediately slaughter all of us. Truth remained, though, that she carried two vicious looking daggers and a vicious looking bow, and she had a bunch of wardens at her back. We were strangers, and my goal directly contravened hers, so I didn’t intend to tell her outright that we were there to stop whatever it was she’d done or planned to do.  
“Varric Tethras, at your service,” I said, bowing low, before waving a hand toward my companions in turn. “Sciath Adaar, Inquisitor. Marian Hawke, champion of Kirkwall… Salome, hedge mage. Uh, Anders the unconscious mage. And… Cole?”  
I lifted an eyebrow and looked at her, trying to gauge her reaction. She frowned.  
“I think you left the last one outside,” she said. “But alright. Hello, Varric Tethras. I am Calypso. I came here because I, and all the wardens I knew, began to hear the Call.”  
I know, I wanted to say. I know all about the spiders in your brain, about the miracle cure Endreth learned from his mountain witch lover. Calypso turned away from us and began to pace, walking first back toward her wardens and stopping in front of them with her back to us.  
“My friend Endreth learned of an ancient Tevinter god—Ramiroth, lord of sun and stars—“ She coughed the last part, a guttural invocation, before stiffening and turning back to face us. “—with the power to dismiss the call, and bring peace to a warden’s mind, again.”  
Beside me, Hawke passed a hand across her face. Sweat poured down her face and neck.  
“So what about Mister Bones out there?” I asked, interrupting Calypso as she prepared to continue. She frowned, but I needed to disrupt her talk of Ramiroth—maybe it would make Hawke more comfortable.  
“There are dragons buried outside of Weisshaupt,” Calypso said. “I learned of them. I came here to find Ramiroth. We conducted a ritual and pulled the bones from the earth. But we weren’t strong enough to pull his spirit from the Fade.”  
“So?”  
“So,” Calypso said, narrowing her eyes at me. “What is flying around outside is a brainless, but animate, amalgam of bones. Nothing more.”  
“Ah.” Hence why it’d attacked us. I’d assumed it just didn’t like us, because we knew the truth about its followers all being insane. You know, and that whole thing where the entire reason we’d come here being to destroy its following and erase its taint from Thedas forever.  
I looked behind her at the wardens, who all looked—tired. A collection of mages and warriors stood there, shadows beneath their eyes. Calypso followed my gaze, glancing over her shoulder.  
“When I arrived, they were in miserable shape,” she said. “Every warden here had begun to hear the Call. They were in turmoil. They all thought that they would die.”  
“What about you?” I asked, knowing the answer. I wanted to hear it from her.  
She frowned, pain creasing her forehead. “I heard it, too. As did Endreth. It haunted me. The Call claimed every moment. I wanted to die. Do you know what that’s like, Varric?”  
I began to speak and then realized I had nothing to say. No, I didn’t. I’d been through some shit, but I can honestly say that, in all of my travels, never once have I thought that I’d be better off dead. I’ve never entered a battle unconcerned, because I didn’t care whether or not I remained alive.  
Hell, I’ve always been quite concerned with remaining alive. But I didn’t say any of that out loud, and after a moment Calypso smiled a dark little smile.  
“I didn’t understand it. I just knew that it shouldn’t be happening. So when Endreth was able to stop the Call in me, I knew I had to spread the word here. But I wasn’t expecting the confusion I found. It’s better now.”  
“Better?” Anders spat, and I shot him a withering glare as he struggled to his feet, levering himself up with a hand on Hawke’s arm. “You defy the Maker with this. You cheapen the sacrifice of thousands of years of Grey Wardens before you.”  
“How?” Calypso pulled herself up straighter, lips tightening. “Tell me how I’ve done wrong by saving my comrades. I’ve given them independence from a sacrifice wardens should never have had to make.”  
Anders’ face twisted. I knew why. Independence had always been something he held very dear—the notion that’d kept him alive in between his thirteen thousand escapes from the circle tower he’d grown up in. Anders’ independence day had been the day he’d detonated the Chantry in Kirkwall. I’d seen it on his face then—the savage joy, tired triumph in a goal that’d cost too much to reach. And right now, I witnessed his wrath at that notion of independence being perverted.  
“Independence,” he hissed the word, a ghastly sight with all the color drained from his face. He leaned all of his weight onto Hawke. He looked like an eighty year old man, and I sort of hoped Calypso thought he was just old and cantankerous. Might stop her from unleashing warden hell on all of us. “The only freedom you give them is freedom from their duty in the eyes of the Maker.”  
I mean, granted. The wardens had been a lot of things, over the years—honored, then reviled, then honored again, then reviled again. So I guess mostly they’ve been honored and reviled. But they’ve always been there, ready to fight the Darkspawn when Thedas needed them. The Call and their inevitable early deaths were heartbreaking sacrifices every warden would make, and Andraste knew I’d struggled my fair share with the morality of what we planned to do here, but one thing bothered me.  
“Won’t their bodies continue to rot and corrupt, even if they’re not hearing the Call?” I asked, cutting off Calypso again.  
I weathered furious glares from Calypso and Anders, figuring I got bonus points for pissing off our enemy and my ally simultaneously.  
“You don’t understand,” Calypso said. “You don’t—“ Her voice lowered, until she spoke in just a husky whisper. She touched her fingertips to her forehead, shook her head, lowered her hand. “You’ve not heard the Call. If I could rot in isolation in this fortress, it would be a better fate than dying alone in the darkness, eaten by Darkspawn. But it doesn’t matter. This time it was not a true Call.”  
“No,” I said. “That much I can verify for you.”  
“So you would consign them all to remain here until they go mad from the corruption in their veins,” Anders said.  
“You’re a warden,” Calypso said, arching an eyebrow at him. Anders drew back, mouth twitching for a second before he spoke.  
“Yes,” he said. “Technically.”  
She smiled, and shook her head. Turning, she drifted back toward her wardens.  
“The corruption can be combatted. It can be survived for a number of years,” she said.  
Shit. Where she stood beside me, Hawke stiffened, and she threw Anders off of her and took a combative step forward toward Calypso. I didn’t know what she intended but I knew it involved violence, so I grabbed her arm and hauled her back. She leaned against my restraint as Calypso turned to regard us once more.  
“That shit killed my sister,” Hawke snarled, hand at her sword. “It killed her within days. Slowly. She withered away in front of me and there was nothing I could do. You’re making all these people experience that, only over years. Do you understand that?”  
Calypso shook her head again, slowly.  
“I didn’t expect you to understand,” she said, her voice quiet but echoing through the vast hall.  
“Your fucking cult is inside me!” Hawke screamed, and she slapped her other hand onto my arm and scratched me. I yelled and let go, immediately reaching out to try and catch her again. But she slipped through my fingers, stamped two steps toward Calypso, before she fell to her knees, clutching at her head. I jumped for her, hit my own knees, grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back.  
Hawke collapsed backward against me, and I sat there, hoping we looked pitiful enough for Calypso to spare us. When I looked up, Calypso smiled down upon us, an oddly magnanimous expression for what had just happened.  
“We will travel to the ritual ground, and summon Ramiroth into this world,” she said. “Then all of this will be clear to you.”  
I bit my tongue again, but it didn’t work this time.  
“You are literally just summoning a fear demon,” I said, standing up and stepping toward her, hands raised, imploring her to listen. “Grown fat on the fears of wardens. I don’t know if certain fears are stronger than others, but if there’s a fear that’s got to be the strongest, I’m betting it’s warden fears.”  
Calypso frowned. “I know what I’m doing. I know it’s for the betterment of my comrades. You won’t stop me.”  
I didn’t know much at that point, but I knew one thing: If we let Calypso get into the Fade and drag an unimaginably powerful fear demon back into the physical realm, so many people would die. Probably including the comrades Calypso claimed she wanted to save. Probably including me, and Hawke, and everyone in the immediate vicinity. I stood my ground against her.  
“You can’t do this,” I said. “I won’t let you. You don’t know it, but Endreth did. The cult’s influence makes you crazy.”  
“Endreth did?”  
Oh, well. I hadn’t really meant to drop the past tense so nonchalantly and I regretted it instantly.  
“Um,” I said. “Yeah, he’s dead.”  
Calypso took a menacing step toward me and I fell back. Hell, I’m not a tank, I’m honest about my position in life as a strictly ‘back of the group’ kind of rogue. Adaar advanced, drawing his sword in an effortless motion. He took my place facing off against Calypso. When he glanced toward me, he looked grim, a little distracted, a little frayed around the edges. I felt a little frayed, too. Hopefully we wouldn’t all descend to Hawke and Calypso and Fenris’ level of cult-crazy, because I had the feeling our bonds of friendship and camaraderie would shatter in half a second and we’d all be at each other’s throats.  
Calypso gave a dry laugh.  
“Wardens,” she said. “Please escort our friends to the holding cells. Don’t hurt them, but if they resist—“ She shrugged. I didn’t like that shrug. It said if they resist, well, what’re a few rolling heads when you’re trying to revive an ancient cult.  
My panic only lasted a second. Cole had slipped away and stood at the base of the stairs, and I passed him the subtlest look I could. He nodded.  
“We won’t resist,” I said, ignoring the baffled looks I received from Hawke, Anders, and Salome. “What? We won’t.” I stared at them, before grinning cheekily at the broad-shouldered warden who approached to lead us down the stairs and into the dungeon.  
Weisshaupt grew progressively darker, danker, and colder as we descended. Our footsteps rang out and echoed a thousand times in the narrow stairwell, creating a confusing cacophony that followed us long after we’d hit the bottom of the stairs and entered a long, pitch black hallway. I didn’t think anyone else was down here, but I also couldn’t see very well, and my imagination created a hunched, desiccated corpse occupying every cell we passed. Finally we reached the end of the hallway and the warden seized hold of the bars and pulled, levering the door open. He ushered us all inside, locked the door, and walked away. At the base of the stairs, I saw Cole standing with his eyes closed.  
When the warden walked past and began to ascend the steps, the kid reached out and took the keys. Just slipped them straight out of the guy’s fingers, like nothing. He stood there until the echoes of the warden’s footsteps faded, then walked through the darkness toward us. The door clicked when he pushed the key into the lock, and it took me and Adaar leaning on the door to convince it to open again. It screeched like something dying, and for a few seconds afterward, we all stood in tense silence, waiting for someone to thunder down the stairs, alerted by the noise.  
Nothing happened. Apparently we’d waited long enough and they’d left. That was bad, but at least we could stop them, now. Hopefully. We still had an undead, soulless dragon swooping around outside to contend with. Maybe Calypso and company would distract it.  
We climbed the stairs and I schemed. I had no idea where to find Calypso’s ritual ground. Which meant we had to follow the wardens closely enough to find the place, but far enough away not to give away our presence.  
“Cole,” I said.  
He looked at me, his eyes wide and haunted. He looked bad, like he’d looked in the Fade, lines on his face and everything about him sort of tired and scared and feral.  
“I need you to follow the wardens closely,” I said. “Follow them to the ritual ground, then turn around and lead us there, too.”  
He nodded, unspeaking, no emotion crossing his face. He started to walk toward the double doors before picking up a jog and shoving his way outside. I lost sight of him, there. Calypso had done us the favor of leaving the doors open just enough that the scorching desert wind swept in. Ordinarily I would’ve complained, being the sort of dwarf who likes his inside to lack gusts of dust-laden wind, but Weisshaupt had such an uncanny damp chill, the dry wind felt almost welcome.  
Not all of us could slip as easily as Cole had through the miniscule gap between the doors. Adaar and I, and then Hawke, shoved against the doors. We pushed directly into the full brunt of the wind, which contested our exit with its entire force. Panting, I caught a glimpse of Hawke laboring, mouth open, eyes shut, pushing—  
\--the doors gave and we all spilled out onto the ground, because of course we did. No rest for the wicked, though, because that resonating undead dragon roar shook my bones as I stood up. I reached down for Hawke and she clapped on. I dragged her back to her feet as the dragon landed atop Weisshaupt. Scorch marks ran all down its front leg, courtesy (I suspected) of one of the warden mages. Good. Maybe its attention wouldn’t be on us.  
The dragon, henceforth to be known as Mister Bones, snapped its wings outward and hunched low before launching itself from the warden fortress. It rocketed straight upward before turning an almost lazy curve and spiraling downward, straight down the side of the butte. I lurched to the edge of the path, skidding to a halt as my boots sent rocks skittering down into the desert below, and watched Mister Bones hit the fleeing wardens.  
They’d descended the path down Broken Tooth and turned immediately to keep to the side of the butte. They traveled in a loose clump, and there, secreted away in the shadows behind them, I saw Cole. He remained safely outside of the dragon’s impact—the wardens tried to scatter. They weren’t fast enough. The dragon hit the earth face-first, beat its wings once against the ground, raising an unbelievable boom and lifting a billowing wave of sand into the air. And then it crumpled, its shoulder crushing a handful of wardens, the rest of its body smashing into the side of the butte.  
The earth beneath me shook like someone had grabbed Broken Tooth and shaken it. I lost my footing and would’ve gone over the edge, but Salome (who’d, predictably enough, ventured to the very crumbling edge with me) grabbed my arm and fell backward herself. I landed on my ass, but at least I didn’t shatter every bone in my body.  
“Thanks,” I said.  
She nodded breathlessly, then stood back up and took off down the path. Blinking, I noticed that Adaar had preceded her. Hawke and Anders stood close at hand, Hawke with the mage still leaning on her shoulder. When she saw I’d made it out unscathed, Hawke nodded and picked up a shambling jog, as Anders panted and kept up as best as he could.  
I stood up, brushed off my pants, and followed them. How many wardens did Calypso have left? She’d had about twenty before, but I’d watched Mister Bones obliterate what looked like a majority of them. Would her remaining force be sufficient to send Calypso into the Fade?  
At this point, I didn’t care about remaining hidden. Far as I was concerned, Mister Bones had leveled the playing field pretty well with his whole ‘apply face directly to wardens’ maneuver. We went skidding down the mountainside, Adaar leading the way in a semblance of his habitual battle charge. The Qunari leapt down the last of the rocks and hit the desert below, took off for the fleeing wardens as the bone dragon writhed against the ground.  
Wait, what did he expect to do? There went Adaar, charging straight for the dragon that showed every sign of regaining its bearings. Mister Bones sorted himself out, placing first one and then both front feet against the ground, lifting his gargantuan head and swinging it around to stare at the last of us clambering over the rocks onto flat ground.  
Adaar swung his shield high overhead and brought it down square on the dragon’s face. I heard the impact from as far back as I’d ended up. Clang. It reverberated in the dry air, and the dragon roared, reared back, and collapsed, chin smacking the earth, the impact rattling through the rest of his bones. We all piled up behind Adaar, our glorious savior about fourteen times over at this point, and he stood and stared at the heap of vanquished bones for a moment before glancing back at us and continuing his charge. We all followed, but the momentary pause had given the wardens a good amount of distance on us. We lost them.  
“This way!” Cole shouted, abruptly more animated than I’d seen him in days. He looked like hell but he waved us onward frantically, before turning and taking off around the curve of the butte, so that we passed directly beneath Weisshaupt. Beneath my feet, the red earth turned white—we charged onto a saline plain. The wind increased as we cleared the butte, flinging handfuls of white dust into my face. Obviously it couldn’t have mattered less now whether or not the wardens saw us, but my heart still seized when I saw the remaining wardens arrayed on the pale sand.  
They only had one warrior remaining, and she stood with dead eyes fixed on Adaar as the Qunari led our band forward. The rest of them—all mages—stood in a loose circle, some using staves and others just their hands to concentrate their magic. All of them stared straight into the center of their circle, where the air had begun to… change.  
I blinked, squinted—in the middle of them, the desert had vanished, giving way to a verdant jungle. I couldn’t explain it any better than that—white sand beneath our feet with red desert behind and around us, and right there, jungle. The steady bombination of insects thrummed from the portal of jungle they’d manifested. Calypso stood in the jungle and didn’t seem to notice our arrival. She stepped forward and vanished—and then her body crumpled backward to lay in the sand. I blinked, but I guess it shouldn’t have startled me as much as it did—entering the fade in the physical form happened rarely, and mostly to Adaar and/or ancient magisters trying to reach the Golden City.  
One of the mages lost all his color and leaned his weight onto his staff. In the next moment, a second mage collapsed outright. The portal flickered. We had to get through it, now. But as the second mage fell, the dead-eyed warrior woke up a little, blinked and drew her sword, pulling a shield from her shoulders and assuming a stance.  
“Ramiroth chases the Call from my veins,” she said. She swallowed hard—seemed nervous. I shared a glance with Adaar, who obligingly drew his sword and readied his shield.  
“In his name I will die,” the warden said. “To ensure his return.”  
“Don’t,” Adaar said. He actually backed up a step, dropping his weight into a stance of his own—a strictly defensive posture. He shook his head at her. She had to be a third of his weight, even with her plate mail. The sun glinted off the warden sigil in her armor and the sight of it made me feel nauseous.  
Adaar’s yell was almost a sob as the warden crashed into him. She leapt forward and smashed her shield into his. The Qunari pulled his shield up sharply and knocked her back with it, and they separated again, the warden panting hard already.  
“Please,” Adaar said. I lifted Bianca, not really sure what to do, because ending the woman’s life sounded unconscionable. This hadn’t been her choice. Sure enough, Adaar glanced at me sideways when he heard Bianca’s arms extend, and I stepped sideways away from them, putting a hand out to stay the weapons of the rest of my comrades.  
Not that I really had to. Hawke, the most, uh, belligerent and likely to kill someone without warning, had Anders to worry about.  
The warden came on again, striking forward with her shield again. Adaar blocked, but when he did, the warden slashed in with her blade, smashing a dent into the Qunari’s armor. He staggered and she bashed him with her shield.  
Adaar paused. I knew this wasn’t even a contest for him. I saw it on his face. He wanted it to be a fight, but it couldn’t be. We didn’t have time. The third time the warden charged, he beat her sword away with his shield and ran her through. She coughed blood onto the Inquisitor’s face and his mouth twisted. He ripped his sword out of her and she fell without ceremony. In my books, there’s always a certain flair and glory in death—people collapse and have final parting words with their loved ones. They have a final quip at their enemy before dying.  
It’s not real. They just die. Most of the time, they don’t deserve it.  
In the circle, another mage weakened. I saw our time vanishing right in front of me. We had to get in there. We had to stop Calypso from bringing that demon into the physical realm. But footsteps from behind us made us all turn, where we saw Fenris walking toward us across the sand, his sword dragging beside him through the dust.  
The lines of lyrium carved into him flickered and glowed erratically. He stopped a few feet away and stood, before lifting his sword to rest the blade against his shoulder.  
“Fenris,” Hawke said, softly. Adaar grunted, raising his sword a little, but Fenris hadn’t lunged forward to violently impale anyone, so I had hope.  
The elf’s brow furrowed and he fixed Hawke with his vivid green eyes.  
“Hawke,” he said. I held my breath as he locked eyes with Anders, and I felt the tension rise. Like watching two Mabari challenge each other in the streets of Lowtown. Tense, but you can’t look away.  
Fenris shook his head, lowered his gaze, closed his eyes. He passed a hand across his face, dropping the hand with his sword until the tip hit the sand again. Nobody spoke.  
“I was lost, Hawke,” he said, his voice rough, like stones ground together in his palm. “You were the first person who ever wanted me to be safe.”  
“I still want that,” she said, her voice still quiet.  
“I know,” he said. He lifted his face and looked almost beseeching, but I could tell he was fighting. “But you want that for everyone, Hawke. And I realize that now. I’m yours but you’re not mine.”  
I couldn’t decipher Hawke’s expression, a rare occurrence in a friendship as deep and weird as ours. Shit, she looked heartbroken, but also angry.  
“Fine,” she said finally, the edge of a snarl to her voice. “So what now?”  
Fenris covered his eyes with his hand. “Beneath the sun I am born anew,” he said. “I fell—I fell into shadow, and the sun found me.”  
“Fenris,” Anders said.  
“You!” The elf’s head snapped up, a vicious leer written across his face. “You cannot live while I am alive. I refuse to allow it. Ebost issala!”  
I barely managed to duck before Fenris caught his sword back into his two hands and sent it singing toward Anders.  
“Shit!” Hawke yelled. She grabbed Anders and they tripped backward, Hawke barely stabilizing them before they went tumbling back into the dirt.  
Behind us, another mage fell. Before my eyes, the patch of jungle flickered, began to fade.  
“We have to get through!” I shouted.  
Adaar lunged forward and met the second of Fenris’ attacks, steel screaming against steel. Their swords caught and Adaar swung his shield forward, smashing the metal into Fenris’ ribs. The elf relented, dropping his hands and roaring, the lyrium lighting all along his skin. He swung his sword again and it connected with the Qunari’s shield. Sparks exploded from the impact.  
“This is my battle!” Anders shouted from behind me. I tore myself away from once again trying to fight back the choking nausea I felt at the prospect of killing Fenris, and looked at him. He disengaged from Hawke and staggered forward, stabbing his staff into the sand. Fire formed at his fingertips and the rest of the color left his face.  
“Get through,” he said, glancing at me as he approached the dueling warriors.  
“Anders,” Hawke said. “No.”  
The mage smiled, his tired face losing some of its deathly pall. “What was it? ‘I fell into shadows, and the sun found me.’ Thank you.”  
“No,” Hawke said.  
“Varric.” Anders nodded to me. We shared a look, and he opened his mouth, then closed it, and smiled a little at me, too. I returned the nod, returned the desire to say something but not knowing what. ‘Jeez I really hated you all this time’ seemed a little crass. I slung an arm around Hawke’s waist and motioned vigorously to Salome. We all moved toward the entry point.  
I ushered them all through and turned back. Anders sent tongues of fire licking toward Fenris, who startled away from his resolute destruction of Adaar. The Insquisitor seized on the distraction, turned, and came sprinting toward me—he passed and leapt through the portal into the Fade, followed by Hawke and Salome. Fenris fixed Anders with a stare half elf and half wolf, and stalked toward him across the white sand. The little wolf, hunting again. Anders cried out, pouring all of his exhaustion and rage and sorrow into the sound, and cracked Fenris across the chest with his staff as the elf approached.  
“Anders,” I said. He glanced back toward me, brows drawn, panting open-mouthed.  
“I can’t forgive you,” I said. “But I would if I could.”  
His mouth moved. His eyes narrowed, something so sad I could hardly bear it passing across his face. And then he whirled, cracked Fenris with his staff again, and as I turned and stepped through the passageway, I heard him roar—a bestial sound that reverberated with hatred. I felt an enormous presence of fire at my back. Fenris cried out and then, quieter as the Fade closed around me, so did Anders.  
The jungle pulled around me like a cloak. Humidity, insects thrumming in the trees, the sky that particular shade that I’m going to call Fade Green. Adaar, Cole, and Salome had begun to forge through the tangle of foliage, but Hawke stood facing me with arms crossed as I approached. She narrowed her eyes. Didn’t say anything. I walked past her and she followed.  
Within moments of our delving into the jungle, that bone-rattling roar rang out. In the physical realm, it hadn’t carried the same effect—Mister Bones had a mean roar, but nothing like this. This didn’t sound like anything—I felt it more than I heard it, the sort of sound just beneath the level of hearing that gets into your guts and twists them. Overhead, the canopy blew wildly as the dragon passed low overhead.  
Well, that had to be the representation of Ramiroth the fear demon had chosen. And wherever Ramiroth ended up, I felt certain we’d find Calypso there, too. The thought of fighting them both at the same time didn’t delight me, but if we didn’t have another choice, then we’d have to. At the head of our group, Adaar bullied his way through the undergrowth, tearing vines with his horns, grunting as he forged a path for the rest of us. Cole drew his daggers, the shink of the blades coming loose premonitory in the thick, still air.  
Hawke lagged behind and when I paused to allow her to catch up, I hardly recognized her. She and Cole were feeling the effects of the demon’s proximity, and badly. I wondered if I could trust her in a fight.  
Something came crashing through the trees and before I’d registered her as being her, Calypso sprinted past us.  
“The sun, my savior, my holy light!” she cried out, and I noticed after a moment that blood poured down her face. I must have yelled or something, because she turned to face me, and in that instant, I saw the blood spilling from her nostrils, from her ears, from her mouth.  
“I am a fire,” Calypso said, before whipping back around and tearing off into the trees. Another unearthly bellow shattered my train of thought. I ran into a tree, pushed myself off of it, and ran into Adaar instead. He backed up, panting hard, eyes wild.  
“I am afire,” he said. “No, no, Varric, I—“  
Cole, behind him, met my eyes and stabbed the Inquisitor in the side, punching his dagger through a weak point in the armor. A thin line of blood leaked from the kid’s nose, and as Adaar roared, I realized that I couldn’t trust any of them in a fight. Then, of course, I noticed the chanting in the back of my own consciousness—just the barest little murmur, volume growing.  
“Listen to something different!” I shouted, to myself, to everyone else. Then—“Be a goddamn dwarf, Varric!” That was directed entirely at myself.  
I breathed in sharply and tried to embody the stone. Before I could ensure the process would work, I had to run—because Adaar had taken off through the jungle, limping, hand over the wound in his side. Cole pursued him. Hawke sprinted past on my left, and I jogged after her. Salome joined me, staff in both hands, blue eyes scanning the trees.  
“Are you yourself?” she asked after a moment of silent running, accented only by the sound of the bugs and the occasional bird call from deeper in the jungle.  
I nodded, too focused to speak.  
“Me too. I think. I’m not a fire,” she said, just the edge of humor in her voice.  
We stumbled out of the trees and onto a narrow path winding through the jungle—the canopy overhead broke and I caught a glimpse of the dragon flying along, before it ducked and vanished into the trees. Calypso broke cover and ran into the middle of the path just ahead of us, facing away.  
I readied Bianca but before I could do anything, Salome shouted and released a jagged trail of lightning. It caught Calypso, ensnared her, and she screamed. The scent of burning flesh caught me a little off guard, so my shot went askew, catching the warden in the shoulder. My second shot whistled past her head. She whirled to face us, but the dragon bellowed its summons again, and Calypso took off down the path.  
“Get her!” I shouted, and Salome and I ran after her. I love Bianca, but she’s cumbersome, and I ran considerably slower with her in my hands. Salome outpaced me and when Calypso cut sideways back into the jungle, Salome followed and I lost track of them.  
I didn’t stop. The dragon had landed just ahead of where I stood, and I plunged back into the foliage, climbing enormous protruding roots, thrusting vines out of my face. I clambered atop a boulder and when I leapt down, Huna manifested beside me, just a pale slender shape streaking along through the jungle. The sight of her enlivened me, somehow—I mean, she’s bound with a spirit of nature, right? So if she were also charging into glorious battle with this demon—that meant that something larger than us supported our struggle.  
Maybe it meant that we were fighting on the right side of this battle, if such a thing existed. Huna and I burst into a clearing, and she curved around my legs to stop me.  
“Do you remember?” she said. I did. We stood in the clearing she’d shown us, during our previous sojourn in the Fade. Same dark presence. This time, Calypso stood in the center of the clearing, her head bowed, hands to her sides.  
Hawke shouted from the trees—I’d recognize the unbridled ferocity of her battle cry anywhere. She erupted from the jungle and charged Calypso, sword swept out to her side. In that moment, Calypso no longer stood there—instead, the dragon snapped out its jaws and grabbed Hawke.  
She didn’t even have a chance to scream. She just kind of grunted. The dragon shook her once, hard, and flung her sideways. Her body smashed into a tree and hit the ground. She rolled onto her back and lay still.  
Everything around me froze. My heartbeat thundered in my ears. I swear I could hear my blood coursing through my veins. I shoved Huna away and lurched toward Hawke, calling her name once, twice, three times. My voice sounded strange—distant. I landed on my knees next to my soulmate and pulled her to me, not even noticing the degree to which she was falling apart. Instantly I was awash in her blood.  
“Hawke!” Her name tore from me. I couldn’t control it. Adaar burst from the trees and the dragon swiped a claw at him, which the Inquisitor managed to parry with his shield. It sent him staggering, but he recovered, and charged the dragon with a shout that rivaled the demon’s. He swung his sword and it smashed into the creature’s face, dislodged a tooth.  
The dragon crouched and pounced at the Qunari and I knelt there with my best friend in my arms. I couldn’t tell whether or not I was crying, because all of me felt wet from blood, but my vision blurred until I couldn’t discern who was winning in the fight between Adaar and the dragon.  
“You damned fool,” I said, just a whisper, lost beneath the sound of the furious battle going on nearby. I pressed my face against her, tried not to give into the clutch of emotion I felt bundled in my gut.  
And then I thought, why bother? I’d never see her smile again—never hear her voice—never dance with her again.  
Maker. What I’d have given in that moment just to dance with Hawke, one more time.  
“I have to go,” I said to her, huskily. I placed her back on the ground, touched her cheek with a shaking hand. I closed my eyes. The swell of emotion grew, and it burst past the pall of numbness that had settled across me, watching Hawke die.  
I leapt to my feet, ripped Bianca into my hands, and felt all of that emotion pour into the shout I released—a ferocious battle cry of my own. The dragon swung its head toward me and I loosed a furious volley of bolts into it, firing one after another, not paying attention to where they landed. It roared and I roared back, stepped forward, fired one last bolt.  
“You’re not real!” I screamed. I knew what Cole had meant, when he’d said I had to be the stone. I couldn’t be cold, quiet, unchanging stone—wasn’t in my nature. What I could be was a rockslide, chaos and turmoil and force. In that moment, I embodied the stone. I felt it roll through me.  
“Kill this fucker!” I shouted next, charging forward, firing off bolts as I ran. The dragon bellowed again, drawing itself up onto its hind legs. It beat its wings once, twice, in preparation to take off. Huna launched herself forward, pounding across the clearing, and when she reached the dragon she leapt, hurling herself into the air. She latched her jaws around the dragon’s lower jaw and hung there, ripping her body back and forth. All around us, vines erupted from the ground. They snaked up and around the dragon’s bones, wrapping serpentine coils around its ribs and through its eye sockets.  
A burst of lightning struck the beast, caught the vines and traveled along them. Salome marched out of the trees, mouth open, hair plastered to her face with sweat. The dragon thrashed but couldn’t free itself. Adaar, who’d been on his knees at the edge of the clearing, staggered to his feet, clutching his side.  
“I know what you are,” I said, my voice breaking. I didn’t care. I didn’t care that tears bathed my face, now, cut trails through Hawke’s blood. I stamped forward and stood right in front of the beast, staring into where its eyes weren’t. “You’re not a dragon at all, you piece of shit. You’re a demon. And if there’s one thing I’ve killed plenty of, it’s demons.”  
I lifted Bianca. I stared along her length, willing my hands still.  
“Show me what you are,” I whispered. “You’re lying, right now. Show me what the hell you are.”  
The dragon shimmered. The illusion fell away, the skeleton exploding outward with a complete absence of sound, fragments of bone drifting idly through the air. Huna snarled and dropped to the ground, landed hard on her side. She dragged herself to her feet and slunk off.  
Again I faced Calypso. She looked the most possessed out of all the possessed people I’d ever seen. Her eyes shone entirely white in the greenish light, and when she spoke, her voice had a hollow, echoing quality to it.  
“All I wanted was for my comrades to be free,” she said. “To be safe.”  
I narrowed my eyes and fired. My bolt struck her right between the eyes. I fired another, and another, hitting her throat and her heart. She didn’t resist, just flinched backward each time I struck her. She stood there for a moment before tipping sideways and hitting the forest floor with no sound at all. The vines binding her retracted, slipping back into the undergrowth.  
All of my strength left me. Salome, standing beside me, steadied me when I made as though to fall down. I shook my head.  
“I win. You’re dead, your cult is dead, and I’m still alive. I guess that makes me on the right side,” I said. I laughed. It sounded ridiculous to say it aloud. But that had been Endreth’s reasoning. I wasn’t a hero, but neither was he, and neither was Calypso. We were all just doing what we thought would help most. Being on the side that had won meant that Endreth and Calypso would be recorded as villains.  
Salome supported me as I turned and stumbled back to Hawke. I collapsed beside her, and now I didn’t try to stop myself crying. I’d had that vision for so long—of me and Hawke living together in the country, swapping stories and drinking and getting fat—that it felt unfair to have it ripped away from me so decisively. I sat there and held her and witnessed the death, one by one, of all the secret dreams I’d had about my future with her.  
I closed my eyes and I saw the blackness of my suite in the Hanged Man again. I heard her breathing as she fell asleep. I knew she trusted me. I swallowed hard and I saw it again—  
“Do you trust me?”  
“I lost everything, Varric. I’m completely alone. What does me trusting you have to do with anything?”  
“Just answer, okay? Do you trust me?”  
“I—“ I remembered the way her eyes had found mine across the table in the Hanged Man. It’d been hours since everyone, including the barkeep, had gone to bed. “—Yes. More than anyone.”  
“Then trust me when I tell you you’re the farthest thing from alone. Your family died and I will mourn them with you for the rest of my damned life, Hawke. But don’t you dare tell me you’re alone.”  
She’d put her head down on the table, her hair still long then, stretching her hands out toward me across the wood. I’d taken them in my own, sat there looking at her—the broken warrior, her life in my hands. She trusted me to make everything better, but she wouldn’t say it.  
“You blame yourself for Bethany’s death,” she said.  
“Yeah.”  
“Why? Because of Bartrand?”  
“Because—“ I sighed. “—it’s my job to keep you safe, Hawke. It’s your job to save the entire world from crumbling in on itself, and it’s my job to be at your back, keeping you safe. I couldn’t save Sunshine and I couldn’t save your mom.”  
“Why do you want to keep me safe?”  
“Because I love you.” In the depths of the jungle, I smiled. I could see it so clearly—how she’d tightened her hands in my own, the muscles in her shoulders tensing. But she hadn’t lifted her head.  
“I love you, too.” Hearing the words had been—exhilarating, almost. And terrifying. Because I knew I’d never leave her grasp after seeing her like this, after hearing her say those words. I was stuck. I was hers. And I was happy.  
I opened my eyes and Huna padded toward us. She stopped and the dog vanished, giving way to the white-haired, slender woman.  
“She lost too much,” I said to her. “She lost everything. And now I have to lose her.”  
The ghost of a smile crossed the witch’s face.  
“Nature has a way of evening things,” she said. “Of righting wrongs, and restoring what has been lost.”  
I frowned at her. I didn’t understand.  


***  


The guardsmen told us we could find Aveline in the sparring arena behind the barracks, and there we found her, beating the shit out of a practice dummy. Dressed in just a greenish vest and breeches, she’d clearly been at it for hours—sweat glistened on every inch of her skin. She heard us enter and left off mid-swing to glance toward us. She completed the maneuver, grunting as her sword struck the mannequin, before sheathing her blade and walking toward us.  
“I’m glad you came back,” she said. “We had one more death, after you left. I was about ready to hunt you down anyway, even though you’d left town.” Aveline sighed, putting her hands on the fence between us and leaning her weight onto it.  
“Everything back to normal, now?” Hawke asked, crossing her arms. She and Aveline always butted heads to a certain extent, but they’d always had each other’s backs.  
Aveline nodded. “In fact, we had a couple of the Suns turn themselves in. They didn’t remember much, just that they’d heard things and had killed people.”  
“You string ‘em up, Captain?” I asked, laughing.  
She smiled. “Absolutely. No mercy in Kirkwall. They should know that.”  
“How are you?” Hawke said.  
“I’m fine. Donnic says I’ve stopped yelling in my sleep. No more nightmares. Or—well, just the usual nightmares.” Aveline shrugged. “Sorry about all this, Hawke. I guess this time I dragged you into trouble.”  
Hawke laughed. “Probably about time for a role reversal.”  
We stood together in silence for a moment.  
“Anyway,” Hawke said. “It feels a little like—retribution. This time I could help.”  
“Nine people in, unfortunately,” Aveline said.  
“Yes, but,” Hawke said, “I saved that tenth person’s family a lifetime of grief.”  
Aveline’s enigmatic smile curved her lips again. “I agree. Thank you. And both of you—if you ever need anything, you know where to find me.”  
Hawke and I said our goodbyes and walked back through Hightown, the sun shining faintly through a pall of clouds. We’d rolled back into Kirkwall two days ago, and had all basically collapsed into a heap in a room at the Hanged Man and fallen asleep for two days. Then we’d all eaten enough for three times our number. That night, a white dog had appeared outside the Hanged Man, and I watched from the doorway, unable to hear, as Salome spoke with her mother. The girl knelt and embraced the slender dog—she’d turned back to me and waved, and after they’d walked out of sight, I knew I’d probably never see them again.  
I still didn’t know what Huna had done to Hawke. She’d given her something, to coax her spirit out of sleeping, is what the witch had said as explanation. She’d refused to answer further.  
“The world hasn’t finished with her, yet,” she’d said to me, as I’d carried an unconscious but breathing Hawke out of the Fade. “Her time will come. But it is not now. Keep her safe.”  
Huna had discovered the living essence of an ancient warden cult in the Fade, been kicked out of Kirkwall, had bound herself to a spirit of nature—and then had fallen in love with a Grey Warden and had accidentally caused all of this. I didn’t know how to feel about her. I still wondered why she hadn’t tried to protect Endreth, or hell, tried to protect her own daughter from Endreth. I wondered if Endreth had even known the frightened blue-eyed mage had been his daughter. I’d watched Huna and Salome walk away together and I wished them all the happiness in the world. Maker knows such happiness is hard to find, in this world.  
Hawke slung her arm across my shoulders as we walked, and I pushed my fingers through hers.  
“Where’s the other two?” she asked, referring to Adaar and Cole, who had taken off in company earlier in the morning. Adaar had forgiven Cole admirably for stabbing him in the side.  
“I don’t know. Gallivanting around Kirkwall, leaving only destruction in their wake.”  
Hawke laughed. “I thought that was our job.”  
“Well, my dear Hawke,” I said, grinning sideways at her. “I’ve been thinking about retiring.”  
“Oh yeah?”  
“And after watching you die, I’m thinking it’s time you retired, as well.”  
She laughed again, incredulously this time. “Varric, where would I be without the ability to hit things and solve problems?”  
“How about once a week, I’ll stand really still, and you can hit me.”  
We walked through Hightown and descended into Lowtown, jostling each other and joking, headed for the Hanged Man.  
Just like old times.


End file.
